Consumer has to have access to content on all the platforms: Kranti Gada

With mobile increasingly becoming the primary screen of users, there is growing need to explore the new technologies that can help deliver a seamless multi-platform experience as well as how to keep mobile at the centre of this experience. 

While speaking on ‘Delivering Seamless Multi-platform Experiences Beyond Mobile’ at the recently held The Mobile Media Summit, Kranti Gada, COO, Shemaroo Entertainment, mentioned how before moving towards the future, the digital and how the consumer is going to evolve and how media and advertising will evolve, there is a need to take a step back and look at the real second screen – Television. For long, filmamakers had been going the theatre route to present their creativity and monetise their content. All this changed when television came into the picture. “Television began with piracy and the entire content community was worried about their revenue being taken away by them,” remarked Gada. 

She added, “It took people like then Shemaroo MD and other key people in the industry at to convince film producers like Yashraj, Yash Johar and Gulshan Rai that video content will only increase consumption of Bollywood content. They then agreed to license content, paving the way for new monetisation streams around VHS or home theatre. Was it a threat to the theatrical revenues? No. It actually expanded revenues and expanded the audiences who were actually consuming Bollywood content.” 

Gada noted how a decade later, with the Gulf War BBC inadvertently became the first private broadcaster to stream into Indian homes without being officially licensed by the Government of India. However, with the growth of private broadcasting, the fear arose again of losing one’s revenues. “Then came the advent of Digital, which also started from piracy; the first platform, which was the UGC, was the original platform,” said Gada. 

However, today platforms like YouTube have become great monetisation tools. “The consumers are ahead of us and we can see that if we dive into the past and track the growth. A consumer never tells what they need; they will buy what you have to sell. This is how the business is set up such that you give what everyone needs,” Gada remarked. 

She further pointed out, “The consumer never cares for the media or mediums; all they want is to experience what we creators create for them. We at Shemaroo have been doing that and today we actually take the same piece of content and deliver it across media. The consumer has to have access to content on all the platforms; we can’t just expect them to come to use the content on just one of them.” 

She insisted that mobile isn’t taking anything away from television, but it is adding up another layer to it. “A lot of content creators are now looking to actually using mobile actively to continue the same story which is being told on other screens. In many TVCs there have been instances where the actors have their connections to their social media account and that unfolded a completely new story. So, I think as content creators, you need to be able to engage the consumer on the entire journey,” Gada stressed.

Watch the full address.

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