"Ethnic formats are a rave these days"

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Gold the most preferred investment

: is your personal standing in a particular vertical. That’s what establishes your brand value.

How do you define “quality” in this particular genre?

Quality is a function of several things—good creatives, budget and, of course, time. With domestic productions, since everything is crunched, especially time, quality sometimes (not always) suffers. Eventually, everything is tied. If there are unplanned time and budget overruns, the creatives will also feel constrained to work in such a climate.

India has a strong story telling tradition. Some of our ethnic narratives are being borrowed and sold in other markets. Have you begun to employ these cultural motifs in your productions?

MAD, our music and art show on POGO, is a seven-season top live action show that Turner is going to localise for the South American market. This trend will begin to unfold on a bigger scale once the Indian TV market gets more closely linked to the global market.

Ethnic formats are a rave these days. In fact, many established global players are test launching their products on Indian audiences before rolling them out in other markets, one, because testing is cheaper in India, and two, because digital distribution has made it possible to focus content more narrowly to a specific kind of audience. It would be difficult to duplicate this kind of reverse engineering in other markets.

Where does India stand in the animation arena? Do we still exist as sweat shops or have we graduated to producing original content?

Sweat shops is a very strong word to use for the business that we operate in. It may be a reality in the IT and animation space, which is a lot of repetitive work but not in TV production, where there are creative inputs required at all levels of production.

Today, there is a channel for every genre, and the general entertainment space is going through great chaos. Do you agree?

There certainly is competition and space for more in a country of 1.2 billion, multiple languages, tastes and preferences. This is just a tip of the iceberg. However, over the years, there would be consolidation for sure. A lot of small players may tie up and be part of a bouquet focused on specific audiences, rather than trying to be all things to all people. As a result, there won’t be any spillovers. There would just be a lot less of general content.