The year was 1998. A landmark in the true sense considering that?s when India?s first 24×7 news channel, started by Star and NDTV, took off. It?s a fact known to most. Few remember that it was in 1994 that DD3 was launched with an intent to provide live current affairs and news programming. The channel was reportedly shut down by the then PM Narasimha Rao, fearing ?live? current affairs programming to be dangerous. Having faced defeat in two state Assembly elections that year, the Congress wanted to tread every step with caution. After all, elections for two other states were impending. A year later in 1995, Prannoy Roy went ?live? with News Tonight, a daily news bulletin on DD, much to the chagrin of the PMO. The show would have been shelved, but for a unique solution arrived at to make it technically ?not live??the bulletin was telecast five minutes after recording.
That was then. Since there has been phenomenal growth in the sheer number of channels, with over a hundred vying for a few minutes of the viewer?s attention. Vernacular news in itself has become a Rs 5-billion strong market, as the past decade saw the launch of close to 80 regional channels trying to monetise the demand for hyper-local content.
Media pundits often share an interesting anecdote to capture the story in a nutshell. Not too long after 1992, the year Zee TV was launched, one evening Subhash Chandra got a call from one of his brothers. He was surprised that in the past one hour there had been only three ads on the channel. ?That?s the good news,? Chandra replied, ?the bad news is that all the three ads are free.? Consider that then even entertainment programmes invited few ads. Today, the ad-editorial ratio of leading news channels during prime time, as per Centre for Media Studies research, is over 50%.
Today, though the exclusivity of live news has been lost, 24×7 news channels are making up for it by content and approach. Who can forget the rescue efforts for five-year-old Prince, who fell into a well in Haryana, which was covered live by Zee for 50 hours. If the channel had received 25,000 SMSs at the time of Mumbai blasts, Prince had lakhs of them flooding the line. Later, 26/11 had the entire nation glued to their TV sets. Innovation has been the key in the past decade and news is no longer staid and boring. Debates, talk shows and citizen journalism have made news channels an interactive medium.
But this mushrooming growth is not without its own challenges. As Aruna Sharma, DG, Doordarshan, points out, ?Dearth of talent is what we now need to overcome. The average age of a DD employee is 50+…there?ll be heavy level of retirement in the coming years.? And on the revenue front? ?News channels should not be termed as channels that can break even. As a public broadcaster, 80% of my earning comes from roughly five hours of programming on the national channel. That?s enough to run expenses of 31 channels.?
Barun Das, CEO, Zee News Ltd, gives strength to her voice when he says, ?The proliferation of news channels apart, consider the performance of the listed companies. Most of them are still in the red. The news channels combined viewership share would be 7% of the total TV viewership and the revenue share just about 13%.? He adds: ?The distribution bottleneck is not working in favour of the industry. Worldwide, the subscription revenues comprise 70% of the total revenues for the TV industry. In India, it is the reverse. There is disinclination amongst Indian audience to pay for consumption of media. It is still in an analogue mode, the last mile of which is not traceable. Only 15% of the total analogue distribution revenue reaches the broadcaster. Moreover, a typical household is able to download just about 50 channels while there are 500 channels vying for that space. The supply-demand equation has given rise to the concept of carriage fees, which is one of the largest cost share for news channels.? He hopes digitisation will do away with this and other problems as well. The optimism is well grounded?the number of DTH homes is growing by a million a month. In less than two years, India will have 50 million DTH households?the largest in the world.
Ashok Venkatramani, CEO, Star News, is hopeful too. ?The carriage fee paid to cable operators has gone up 200-300 times in the past three years. It?s next to unmanageable.? He shares another reason too: the intense competition from entertainment channels. ?There has been a virtual explosion in the entertainment genre. And, the viewing time of the audience is finite. There?s no comparison of the level of investment made on a big entertainment property and that made on a news programme. Heightened activity on the entertainment space tends to get the eyeballs and hence also ad revenues. Moreover, GECs being paid channels get the subscription revenue too,? he adds.?
There are concerns about the content side of news as well. The issue of exploiting the media as a propaganda vehicle for one?s own vested interests being one. Just last month, Sakshi TV, owned by dissident Kadapa MP Jaganmohan Reddy, reportedly aired a programme attacking Congress president Sonia Gandhi and PM Manmohan Singh. ?It?s not a well-regulated industry. A large number of players have entered the news space, many for reasons other than economic. News is powerful. It opens doors… politicians and builders have got into it. Diversified businesses help them spread the risk. But we are governed by 26% cap on FDI, so we have to stand on our own feet. It puts pressure on our ability to develop and invest in a good quality channel,? says Venkatramani.?
Rajdeep Sardesai, editor-in-chief of CNN-IBN, IBN7 and IBN-Lokmat, points out at other legitimate concerns: ?There is a creeping tabloidisation of content, subsequent erosion in credibility, being first and not being accurate is a mantra for some channels. News is not box office.?
In this context, DD News seems to have fared better than most. ?As a public broadcaster, DD News has consciously decided to refrain from what most private channels are following. We give only news, not opinion. Private news channels have become quasi-entertainment. The issue of paid news also needs to be urgently addressed,? adds Aruna Sharma of DD.
A study by CMS Media Lab shows that the share of entertainment segment in news rose from 6.1% in 2005 to 16.15% in 2007. Thereafter, it gradually dropped to 12.8%. The share of crime segment in news also fell by half. Most viewers may recall a show called Kaal Kapaal Mahakaal launched on Zee News in 2004. ?In the beginning of 2008, we sanitised the news channel. We ensured that Page 3 does not replace front page. I may have an entertainment content, but in the FPC (Fixed Point Chart) of half an hour a day. News ought to be relevant,? says Das of Zee.
A niche market nevertheless exists and fuels the demand for genres such as entertainment and crime. Saas Bahu Aur Saazish and Sansani have consistently performed well for Star News for the past six years. So much so that Saas Bahu Aur Saazish even has a Facebook page with over 50,000 fans! ?Consumers are viewing news channels exactly like a newspaper, demanding different categories: main, city, business, world, astrology, etc. News channels have to have sub-genres too. So, if in the morning we have to provide astrological forecast for the day based on tarot card or zodiac signs, we recognise the need to have it,? reasons Venkatramani.
Most players have also begun to recognise that social and technical media are moving out of the domain of geeks and becoming mainstream. The dial-up days are long over and for most Twitter or Facebook is the first login of the day. So, while Star News is ?soon launching an IVRS service to deliver news?, CNN-IBN already has an iPhone application in place and is working towards ?having a 360 degree approach to news?. There is a need to cater to a niche audience and focus on mass market penetration.
Meanwhile, the proliferation continues. Zee launched new channels even as businesses tightened belts and cut spending during the slowdown. ?Launching then meant you could do everything at a low cost. It was a buyers? market. Some of those channels have started performing now,? explains Das. ?We are working on launching a few channels that will strengthen our news bouquet,? says G Krishnan, ED & CEO, Aaj Tak and Headlines Today.