Effect of Trps..

A couple of years ago I heard you issue a call to arms to the Indian TV industry about its troubled financial health. Do you think the industry has sorted out its problems?

It's still a work in progress. One big change in that direction is digitization. People often do not realize how big a catalyst for change it's likely to be, not just for distribution or subscription, but its ability to trigger localization of content is going to be revolutionary. Because bandwidth of cable is so limited that if you wanted to create content for let's say western U.P. [Uttar Pradesh], the economic model doesn't work for it because the cost of distribution is so high. If digitization happens and every cable operator can deliver 500 channels, then the cost of carriage becomes much less.

But in much of India, isn't the problem that there are too many channels competing for a finite number of viewers and advertising rupees? For instance, there are probably more than a dozen 24-hour news channels.

I don't think the problem is over competition. If you see a country of 1.2 billion people and the number of channels, it's actually not that many. If you go and see the number of channels in the United States, India doesn't have too many channels. The problem is sameness of content.

Look at the size of the Hindi market. It's a huge market with 500 million people. Why shouldn't there be a dozen channels? The problem is that each of those dozen channels are giving the same news at all points in time. That's both a creative, strategic issue as well as a business issue.

Most of the channels are not making any money. They are losing money and hence their ability to invest in content, their ability to invest in strategy, their ability to invest in talent is really limited, and because you have poor talent, poor resources, you are either replicating content or creating very poor content.