FICCI Frames '15: Making India the Global Entertainment Superpower

Vision 2020: Laying a transformative roadmap for Indian Broadcasting. In its three decades of existence the promising broadcast narrative in India continues to be challenged on issues such as transparency, pricing, taxation, consumer choice and lack of a coherent regulatory and policy framework. Thought leaders deliberate on key enablers for unlocking value in Indian broadcasting.

S K Gupta, Principal Advisor (Broadcasting & Cable Service) , TRAI threw light on how the industry has moved forward since the new government came in power. He also mentioned that the ecosystem is not the same from top to bottom and functioning as a body without a stable ecosystem is difficult and hence decisions take time.

He said, "There are a lot of technical challenges that are different from usual. There are issues where decision making has taken longer than expected. But when change happened globally it took the same amount of time that it is taking in our country."

Agreeing to what Gupta said, J S Mathur, Addl Secretary, MIB said, "TRAI has a vast number of stakeholders and it needs to take into consideration all problems before it comes to preparing recommendations and that what really takes long."

He adds,"The delay in Radio auctions was not because of TRAI recommendations, there were other issues as well like migration while the earlier policy did not talk about migration. So as soon as things stabilized with the new government we kicked off auctions."

Giving a global perspective Jim Egan, CEO BC Global news said, "In the UK market as well there are regulations and it has been seeing a lot of growth. But there since digitization has already taken place, it is now a challenge to broadcasters like us because the TV market is declining. 2020 is going to mark the 21st Birthday of the internet and that time will be different altogether."

V D Wadhwa, Executive Director & CEO, CitiCable said, "We need to be ruthlessly honest among ourselves and to our stakeholders. I don't think making money from consumers and marketers is a challenge. We need to first complete the challenge of digitization to set transparency."

He adds, "As competition, we need to work together to increase monetization in the industry.

Harit Nagpal,CEO Tata Sky just said, We can either have monopoly or regulation and if we have regulation that means there are more players in the market."

Rahul Johri, EVP & GM, Discovery Networks Asia Pacific said, "It's a great time for the industry."He mentions that the industry is more entrepreneur lead and if there is regulation or over regulation then its a problem for the industry.

Sanjay Gupta, COO, Star India raises   a question as to how do we make a 30000 crore industry to a 300000 crore industry in the next decade.

On a concluding note to this session, Sudhanshu Vats, Group CEO Viacom18 said, "If we stick to the analog regime, we are restricting the pie to increase. We need to open the pie to get a win-win situation."​

After a session on the growth in Indian broadcasting was an interesting session Decoding kids content consumption.

If you are a producer of kids' content, be it TV series, movies, books, comics, games or apps then this is a must attend panel. The expert panel will present the data on kids' content consumption across media- electronic and print- and also help you decode this data. How does this data impact decisions made by commissioning editors and TV programmers? The panel will put in perspective global and domestic trends and how producers should use this data and understand trends.

In an interactive session with prominent personalities from the industry, the session highlighted on how kids consume content. Different age groups consume different type of content and then there is gender segmentation.

Not only that there needs to be a lot of effort put on content, animation, characters and lot more. The only reason why kids are attracted to viewing such content is because of the characters individual broadcasters create.

Sundip Nagpal, CEO, Stratagem Media shared some statistics about viewership share of all genres. Surprisingly, in the age group of 4-9 years 30% is kids genre, 35% is GEC and 35% other genres while in the age group 10-14 years kids genre has a 14% share GEC has 41% and other genres have 45%."

Ashish Karnad, Group Business Director, IMRB International gave us some insights on why kids go to watch the television. He said, "Two out of three kids seek entertainment primarily to reduce tension from studies." Indeed the truth in today's competitive world.

Nina Jaipuria, EVP & GM, Sonic & Nickelodeon India started her discussion by saying, "The future of Television is Television. It's not going to die." She agreed to what Karnad said above and also mentioned why kids come to watch kids entertainment.

She added, "The primary reason why kids watch kids entertainment is because they want to escape the competitive stressing world to an imaginary world. Animation is the only medium which is familiar to them and they feel safe with.

Concludingly she elaborates on the three most important factors of why kids want entertainment, "Firstly, the character is the central part of why the child has come to the channel. It becomes the central part of the child's life. Secondly, Story Telling is very important. And lastly, the quality of animation, music, background,etc. all of them play an important part in image building in the minds of kids."

Day one ended with a lot of prospects for the broadcasting industry. It was a power packed day where a lot of thoughts exchanged with like minded people. The focus for yesterday was more on sessions on broadcasting and film. Today will see some Radio sessions and other media sessions. Stay tuned to know more about what's happening in FICCI Frames 2015.

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