Media can be a ‘Make in India’ story

“Indian media and entertainment (M&E) industry story, the big ambassador of Indian soft power, is that of a glass half full and half empty”, said Siddharth Roy Kapur. Rightly so.

The sector, according to the industry status report released by Ernst & Young and FICCI, touched $22.7 billion in 2017, a growth of 13% over the last year, while the economy overall grew at half that rate. It is poised to cross $31 billion by 2020. On the other hand, a few large areas of the industry, that is print, radio, music, out-of-home and television, all grew at less than 10% over the previous year, print being at a lowly 3%. Animation, films and digital media grew by 25-30% over the previous year.

Direct employment in M&E sector has crossed one million people and the total, including indirect and induced employment, is above five million, a substantial number but miniscule in a nation of 1.3 billion. And a huge majority of them are under-trained and digitally semi- or sparsely skilled. Media jobs being non-repetitive and creativity driven, though technology-facilitated heavily today, remain an area which will not largely be replaced by machines and hence are long-term job prospects.

The film industry has grown by a very healthy 27% over the earlier year and stands now at Rs 15,600 crore in 2017, which is still less than half of what the largest grossing Hollywood film Avatar earned in all languages globally. While India produced more than 1,500 censored films in all languages together last year, Hollywood did not cross 700, but we earned roughly 1% of the total income of Hollywood!

We had around 8,000 film screens by the turn of this decade in 2010 and China some 9,000. But today, China has crossed 45,000 screens for films, and we are at 9,000 total. Dangal, with more income in China than in India, and Bahubali in all languages together and both parts included, have earned like successful Hollywood films. Even Marathi and several South Indian language films have earned more than
Rs 100 crore each.

India produces 16,000 hours of fresh entertainment content for all general entertainment television channels together, which is 12 times more than the US, but earns less than 8% of the latter’s income. We have 784 million TV-viewing people in India, more than the total population of the European continent, but an income much lower than the latter.

Despite the high 30% growth of the digital media in 2017, to Rs 12,000 crore (up from Rs 9,200 crore in 2016), use of Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence in the entertainment sector is still in its infancy, unlike globally, where they contribute heavily to content generation.

Force multiplier

We are aware of the force multiplier impact of entertainment on other sectors of the economy, like tourism (e.g. Ladakh after 3 Idiots), fashion and merchandise and retail sales, etc. Tourism is already a $150 billion industry and the media fuels it. The media has seamless linkages with e-commerce. However, the potential in all of these remain unexploited.

There are several things that the industry itself can do to strengthen its reach, impact, business and engagement of audiences. First, it has to realise that collaboration is a better strategy than competition. Also, industry has to take common stands when facing the government, when combating attacks from fringe elements on it and when upgrading its standards.

Second, each media platform or initiative needs to learn to have some unique positioning, specialisation and focus and not do everything for everyone. Third, industry needs to wake up to measurement, accountability and big data analytics. Fourth, it must learn to collaborate with the youth.

The government can be a game-changer too. And the biggest is the commencement of e-enabled time-bound, single window of clearances for events, licensing, varied content production permissions, etc, on which the Niti Aayog is working with support from the industry.

With data-prices falling, digital access to entertainment and information content has grown tremendously. Audio-video consumption experiences should be even better with 5G connectivity coming ahead. Policy paralysis and uncertainty have often plagued the industry. Since demonetisation and GST have been twin attacks on the media economy, it now needs a strong fillip from the government to gain lost ground.

The Union Minister for Information & Broadcasting interestingly noted that Indian M&E industry should not compare itself with Hollywood and China, but should position itself uniquely with its story-telling skills, with the largest media consumer base in the world being here.

The sector has to re-imagine itself, and in digital language and space more particularly, to create global capacity going beyond the domestic market and the NRI-PIO circles. The media can be the true-blue ‘Make In India’ success story — with stories, people, technologies, places and force multiplier synergies with other sectors of the economy, all being here and now in India.

(The author is Head, School of Media, Pearl Academy, Delhi and Mumbai)