Atul Phadnis

Success has brought more players into the news segment. This may have increased the segment's overall viewership share but each player's slice in that pie has got that much more thinner.

THE most clichéd statement that anyone in the world of television could have made in the last five years would have to be that the TV world is changing fast! Of course, we know that! As analysts, specialists, viewers, stakeholders, we have seen the churn and the turn of being in this industry.

But this article is not about the change that we have seen or what appears to the naked eye but about the subtle undercurrents. These changes are shaping the way the 85 million TV households are consuming their daily staple of television! This slow turn is in the area of a greater viewer specialisation changing the characteristics of TV consumption! Before I elaborate let's look at an interesting parallel from Nuclear Physics.

We have all heard of nuclear fission ... it's a process whereby a massive nucleus (like uranium-235) breaks apart and yields energy because the sum of the masses of the fragments will be less than the mass of the uranium nucleus. Simply put, nuclear fission is the splitting of an atom into two or more parts. When such an occurrence takes place, a very large amount of energy is released. This can occur very quickly as in an atomic bomb, or in a more controlled manner allowing the energy to be captured for useful purposes.

Let's now put this definition in the context of the TV media ... nuclear fission (read "TV fission") is the splitting of an atom (read "mass entertainment channel genres") into two or more parts (read "niche content channels"). When such an occurrence (read "fragmentation") takes place, a very large amount of energy (read "incremental viewership, increased revenues") is released.

So as you can see, the fission that will always take place in this space is really the consistent attack on mass entertainment as a genre. And the fragments that break out as a result of this fission are the specialist content areas.

This has a lot to do with mass entertainment as a genre. It's supposed to be for all audiences (mass market and upscale) as well as all age and life-stage groups. By nature of such a requirement, mass entertainment is an amalgamation of various different genres of programming such as films, news, sports, dramas, music and weather. Channels like DD National, Star Plus, Sony Entertainment and Sun TV are all examples of such a wide range of offerings.

However, the risk that mass entertainment always faces is that if individual genres within them turn into standalone offerings, it makes that offering that much weaker. The example in front of us is very clearly News as a segment. Earlier an offering from mass channels (DD National, Sun, Star), news has now broken away from mass entertainment into a separate channel genre by itself. With this development, this genre within mass entertainment has got weaker.

A TAM S-Group study to compare the changed trends on the top six mass entertainment channels (DD1, DD2, Star Plus, Zee TV, Sun TV & SET) across three years — 2000 to 2003 — revealed very interesting results! News that contributed to 17 per cent of their combined viewership in 2000 reduced to only 12 per cent in 2003.

The logic is very simple. Why should a viewer get his daily ration of news from the limited offering through mass entertainment channels if there are dedicated news `specialist' channels giving it out every half-hour right across the day?

The success of news channels is now a well-analysed phenomenon. And the fission theory again holds true in this case when it says that the breaking away of the fragments will release an awesome amount of energy! That's exactly what has happened with news channels bringing incremental monies that were otherwise not meant for television. Aaj Tak's entire effort initially brought in new advertisers, who traditionally were Press clients, into TV!

The fission with respect to mass entertainment in the meanwhile continues unabated. Earlier it was news, movies and music. Now the next breakaway genre seems to be Kids. Currently, a bulk of kids' viewership still comes from mass channels. While Cartoon Network and the couple of other kids' TV stations have made considerable progress, the sheer reach and language advantage that mass entertainment currently sport ensures their hold on this audience at this point. But the genre is set to explode with at least five new channels set to enter the space in the immediate future. The curious question obviously is how soon will the fission (erosion of kids audiences from mass entertainment) take place and release new energy (bring increased monies on television through kids channels)?

Actually this trend is quite similar to how other economies have reacted to specialist offerings. Robert McCann from Nielsen Media Research International addressed this briefly while speaking at Ficci FRAMES-2004 a few weeks ago in the context of the American market (NMR-International is TAM's parent company and does the TV ratings in the US market).

In the US too, the three large mass entertainment networks have eroded vis-à-vis specialists entering the market. The combined share of ABC, CBS and NBC reduced from a whopping 94 per cent in 1965 to 63 per cent in 1990 to only 40 per cent in 2001! But in this period, the entry of specialist channels expedited the growth in the TV industry by an awesome proportion!

So what does the fission argument mean for mass entertainment? Does this mean that they will lose audiences? Well, not necessarily. The issue is really about creating newer genres that will continue to hold audiences as older genres splinter into standalone channels by themselves. In the last couple of years we have seen experimentation in mass entertainment through the testing of newer genres including mega-budget action programs, dubbed programming, telefilms and so on. In fact, fission could potentially present a mass entertainment channel the option of leading its audiences onto a specialist channel within the same family ... say DD National leading its news audiences onto DD News.

In fact, here is where a multi-platform distribution (DTH, terrestrial, cable & satellite, CAS) that India is heading for will act as a huge enabler. The other obvious enabler is language, a lesson broadcasters learn time and again. Discovery, MTV and Star News are examples of such share gains as they applied this key enabler in the recent past.

The one thing to guard against, however, here is greed! The greed factor has consistently followed the same pattern again and again. One success story and the whole world of gold-diggers rush in. That happened with game-shows post-KBC, it happened with mythological serials in 2001-02 and it happened with news channels last year. The mythological serials' goose that was laying golden eggs was cut when a spate of such serials hit the tube on every conceivable God possible!

Same is the current fate of news channels — five channels having a 2 per cent overall viewing share have turned into 22 channels having a 4 per cent share! The slices have become thinner because too many people have rushed to grab the coveted pie! In such a scenario while fission produces the desired effect, including higher revenues, it shouldn't carve out pieces which are too small.

Finally, famous last words...

The mass entertainment TV business looks very similar to nuclear fission! That we are going into thinner slices but ... the pie is getting bigger with ... the ever increasing viewer appetite for television!

(The writer is Vice-President, TAM Media Research. He heads the Strategy Group at TAM as well as ADEX India, the advertising monitoring agency. Opinions expressed here are his own.)

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