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A slow death for linear TV as audience & advertisers embrace the digital medium

Indian broadcasters never made a sincere effort to engage with their audience. They started out by catering to the lowest denominator, and more than two decades later, the script continues to be the same. If the future seems blurred today, it’s because they didn’t read the writing that had been on the screen

August 16, 2023 / 16:09 IST
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Two recent developments in the Indian television broadcasting industry point to the beginning of a seismic shift that has long been suspected. First, The Walt Disney Company CEO Bob Iger recently announced that the multinational media and entertainment conglomerate planned to sell its linear television assets such as ABC Network and Disney, and explore the sale or possibility of a joint venture for Star India, the country’s largest broadcast network. Second, the proposed merger between Japan’s Sony Corporation’s India business and home-grown Zee Entertainment Enterprises was cleared by the National Company Law Tribunal last week. Linear television refers to conventional broadcasting where content flows in a linear direction from the broadcaster to the distributor and the consumer in a pre-determined schedule. Iger said it’s “clearly a business that is going to continue to struggle”.

TV broadcasting continues to hog the lion’s share in the overall media and entertainment (M&E) pie in India. A whopping 205 million households continue to watch television the old-fashioned way even as cord-cutting and streaming have become a larger phenomenon in developed markets such as the US. According to Nielsen, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon and Hulu beat traditional television networks in terms of viewership in July last year in the US.

Rapid Rise of Digital

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Likewise, at Rs 709 billion, linear TV had the largest share of the revenue pie in 2022 beating all its rivals including digital platforms. But a closer look at digital media’s stride in the past few years paints a scenario that’s not too bright for this segment. Linear TV is bigger but it’s declining and digital is smaller but expanding at a very fast pace. At Rs 571 billion, digital media is the second largest segment in the industry and its share in the total M&E pie has increased from 16 percent in 2019 to 27 percent in 2022.

More telling is the data on advertising and subscription trends. The same report says that TV subscriptions continued to fall for the third year in a row — from Rs 468 billion in 2019 to Rs 392 billion in 2022 whereas digital subscriptions grew from Rs 29 billion to Rs 72 billion in the same period. TV advertising grew only 2 percent while digital advertising grew 30 percent to account for 48 percent of the total M&E ad pie.