Uday Shankar, Vice Chairman of JioStar, on the merger of Disney’s Star India and Reliance’s Viacom18, the crisis in news and why he calls ICC the East India Company of Cricket. This session was moderated by P Vaidyanathan Iyer, Managing Editor, The Indian Express P Vaidyanathan Iyer: Tell us something about yourself as a Patna boy who came to Delhi as a journalist and then became CEO. My father was an engineer who worked for the government. In my initial years I studied in Patna, but much as I would like to claim, my life wasn’t full of struggle. I came from a middle-class background. After doing my graduation, I joined JNU, which was a big landmark in my life, in the sense that it opened my eyes to a very different way of looking at the world. Then I became a journalist, joining The Times of India as a reporter. I chose to go to Patna because in the early ’90s Bihar was the hotbed of political activity. I was really keen to see how the real India works and there was probably no better place for that than Bihar. I worked there for some years and then came back to Delhi, doing a few stints in newspapers, followed by Down to Earth, where I travelled a great deal and saw India in a manner that regular journalism of mainstream newspapers didn’t allow you to see. The first time I watched live TV was in January 1991, when the first Gulf War was being telecast on CNN. I saw that and it completely blew my mind. I realised that for a country like India — where both the ability to read and the access to readership was limited — the power of television was going to be phenomenal. I decided that I had to do TV. I waited a few years and quit without a job, did odd jobs in TV, until one day I met Aroon Purie, who was thinking of launching a 24-hour live news channel. It was the first live news channel of India. Somehow, he saw promise in me and asked me to help set it up and that’s how Aaj Tak happened. After that I came to Star News, followed by Star and the rest of it. P Vaidyanathan Iyer: When the merger of Viacom and Star was announced in November, a $8.5 billion value company was created. As the person giving this huge content to 750 million viewers, what occupies your mind? This opportunity to serve content to 750 million people in different parts of the country is an honour, but I also take that responsibility very seriously. I still see myself as an old-world, old-fashioned journalist. Some of those values I still hold very dear to my heart, and one of them is the ability to inform or entertain, or your access to people is a very powerful tool and you cannot misuse that. One simple principle that I have is that I’ll entertain but I shall never do anything that I will be embarrassed by myself. P Vaidyanathan Iyer: In television, OTT, we see content which is very different from mainstream Bollywood. You find a lot of creative innovation down South, but not much in Bollywood. What would you attribute this to? This notion that you can serve the entire population north of the Vindhyas sitting in a suburb of Mumbai is very colonial. If the population set is not homogeneous, how can a homogeneous unit of people create that kind of content? That is the biggest problem with what we call Bollywood. The power of India and the challenge of India, both come from the layers, diversity and the nuances. The homogenisation that Bollywood keeps forcing itself towards is its biggest mismatch. The power of the South is that they are very close to their core viewers, so a Tamil film is made in Chennai, a Kannada film is made in Bangalore. It is not made somewhere remote by a bunch of people who have just decided that this is what India wants, this is what India looks like, this is how India behaves. The fundamental crisis is that the films are not connecting with people. P Vaidyanathan Iyer: Do these big rights that you take up, for instance BCCI or IPL, coupled with the size that you have today, give JioStar a huge advantage, or is it burdensome, given that IPL rights cost around Rs 48,000 crore? It has its advantages because you are building destinations where everybody comes. It’s mass media: the larger the number of people who are coming to you, the more the opportunity to monetise. So, to that extent, IPL rights or ICC or BCCI rights or other things like that, they have their power. But the cost, how much money you can make, how many people watch, is just one of the factors. The size of the economy, what the advertising market is like, those things come into play. You don’t necessarily make money on these big acquisitions. On ICC | I find BCCI to be a far more alive body to engage with its stakeholders compared to ICC, which in my view is the East India Company of Cricket. It’s just here to take the wealth of this country Sandeep Dwivedi: With this merger, you stated that you are the industry. Speaking about rights, you said that you don’t even mind missing out on cricket because there are other avenues. Is it actually possible for a broadcaster as big as you to miss out on something as big as cricket? What I meant when I said that we are the industry is that given our reach and platform size, what we do will be followed by everybody else. In effect, if we go wrong, the industry will go wrong because usually people tend to follow the leader. As a leader, it is our responsibility to make sure that we take charge of the industry and get it to a good place. Now to the question, can we stay away from cricket? We don’t want to stay away from cricket because it’s such a powerful engine of people’s viewing here. I’m a big believer in the power of sports. Cricket, of course, is the biggest aggregator but I’ve been very passionate about other sports as well. But at the end of the day, we are running a business and if the financials don’t make sense, we’ll have to walk away. Sandeep Dwivedi: Since broadcasters are paying so much for cricket, Indian sports fans are missing out on big events like F1, because nobody has the money left to buy those rights. Do you think it is important that cricket needs to scale down the rights? You have to understand that investment in cricket is no longer cheap. In terms of unit value, if an eight-week tournament like the IPL costs you more than a billion dollars, the headline value of NFL and NBA might be higher, but the season runs through the year, the volume of games etc. Cricket is one of the most expensive sporting assets in the world. So, for us, anyone who wants to come in, there are these big companies globally who have the appetite for that. But the other challenge of cricket is that it is fundamentally one big sport only for India. So, all the money that you put in is primarily for India and you have to recover it from India. Despite all the talk, it’s just the Indian media companies who do that. Shubhra Gupta: When Netflix came into India, it had the first-mover advantage. Other OTT platforms, like Amazon Prime, Sony Liv, followed. We are now seeing similar storytelling on all these platforms. Bollywood, which was supposed to be adjacent, is also now moving into OTT. How do you see building differentials? That’s a challenge, and it’s not unique to India. Globally, how do you differentiate? But I also think that when we sit in judgment from the top, we make these summary assessments rather sweepingly. If you show the same piece of content to 10 people, who all like it, they would like it for 10 very different reasons. That’s the power of creativity. Shalini Langer: You started with Aaj Tak, how do you think news has evolved? There is a fundamental crisis with news that globally it’s not able to resolve. News was the classic business of intermediaries. Because when something is happening in another city, you’re curious, at times also because it affects you. You want to see it yourself but you couldn’t be there. And that’s what newspapers and TV did. They were your surrogate at the spot. Now with technology, every mobile phone is a camera and every person who owns a mobile is a cameraperson. Now the first pictures are being taken by someone who is not a professional newscaster or a camera person, and they are uploading it. So the potential viewer is getting access to the news at the same time as the professional journalist. Ritika Chopra: Does the concept of ‘second screen-friendly’ influence content creation on OTT, given that people are mostly glued to their mobile phones? I don’t know whether or how much it is influencing, but the two screen-behaviour has become very mainstream. Clearly, some people are keeping that on the radar when they are planning their stories. The biggest problem is attention today. Multiple screens are competing for your attention at the same time. So we are in a tough business. Vidhatri Rao: Earlier, in TV especially, you could create shows that sort of cut across multiple geographical boundaries, for instance KBC, Satyamev Jayate. Now that it is so fragmented, from a business point of view are you segregating content and catering to specific markets or do you think as a country we can have that one show that can cut across boundaries? When KBC happened, there were fewer channels. Mobile video consumption was not there. Now I’m not sure anything you can do that will address everybody. Unless there is a set of unique circumstances that come together, like what happened with Satyamev Jayate. There was a lot of frustration and Satyamev Jayate was able to capture that. I struggle to understand whether the fragmentation of content is fragmenting the viewing habits, or the fragmentation of viewing habits is leading to fragmentation of content. Vidhatri Rao: We are seeing a lot more outrage now. You’ve seen what happened with Ranveer Allahbadia and India’s Got Latent. Do you think a show like Satyamev Jayate is possible right now, where on mainstream television we can talk about topics that are not so comfortable? Satyamev Jayate was not confrontational at all. It was very inclusive. On what you just mentioned, the kind of content on social media that just appeared, we all have to be responsible. It’s important to pause and think about what you are doing and what broader effect it will have on society and viewers, because just in order to get eyeballs, you cannot say things that fundamentally are obnoxious. On lack of creative innovation in Bollywood | If the population set is not homogeneous, how can a homogeneous unit of people create that kind of content? That is the biggest problem with what we call Bollywood P Vaidyanathan Iyer: The government has been thinking about looking at content on OTTs and if it should be regulated. Do you see that as something which will curb creative freedoms or do you think eventually streaming partners or channels would themselves do a lot of self-censorship? I don’t like the word censorship but not being responsible towards the people you serve is not an option. I don’t think government control is an answer to that because that just becomes structural rather than effective. It does stifle creativity. On streaming services, I do think that some of the stuff that goes on is really a matter of concern. You can’t hide behind arguments that we are a global platform or an addressable platform, or we are social media, you can’t say that I own the platform, but I’m not responsible for the content. Rahul Sabharwal: Isn’t that a slippery slope, when you say that you start with trying to regulate yourself and then in the case of this content creator that we’re discussing, there are FIRs from Guwahati to Madhya Pradesh to Maharashtra? This is obviously an excessive response. It is a slippery slope. But do you just not want to go there and allow anything and everything to continue? What purpose is that content achieving except for just creating salacious attention? We have to take stock of where we stand and how far we will allow it to go. If we are not cognizant of that, an external authority will come in and say, ‘stop’. P Vaidyanathan Iyer: The way the ICC has driven up the cost now, do you think there is a way to tell the ICC to get the broadcasters’ views also? ICC did not hold a gun to the broadcasters concerned. They wrote the cheque that they wanted to write. The problem is if somebody makes a mistake, do you work as a partner to address that? Or do you just say, you suffer, I need my money and I’ll move on? That’s the key question here. And the answer is that right now that seems to be the attitude of the ICC. On fragmentation of content | I struggle to understand whether the fragmentation of content is fragmenting the viewing habits, or the fragmentation of viewing habits is leading to fragmentation of content Contrary to the general perception, I find BCCI to be a far more alive body to engage with its stakeholders than compared to the ICC, which in my view is the East India Company of Cricket. It's just here to take the wealth of this country, because what does the ICC do? The only effective thing that the ICC does is to make the international tour programme of cricket. That is something that Google does for you for free. ICC takes this money, ICC’s business runs out of India and within India it runs out of the Indian broadcasters. After that the ICC decides that India must play a country that no Indian is interested to watch India play because they want to develop cricket globally. So it’s their agenda and my money. That whole structure is very exploitative. I feel that the best service that someone like the new chairman of the ICC can do is to ensure that he is its last chairman. ICC is not promoting the interests of Indian cricket. A disproportionate share of talent comes from India. An overwhelming share of revenue comes from India. And all of it is going everywhere else. The International Olympic Committee is excited about getting cricket into it. That doesn’t help Indian cricket. That just is a leakage for the money that could have stayed in the Indian cricket ecosystem and benefited Indian players, all the Indian stakeholders. Geetika Srivastava: OTT platforms rely on advertising and subscription models, but are we exploring beyond that? Are we looking for different pricing strategies or packaging strategies, especially microtransactions or sachet packaging? All the global streaming companies were real disruptors in my view but the one area where they didn’t do much disruption was in the monetisation models. It was always ads or subscriptions. And I think that is where the big opportunity lies, because there are all kinds of monetisation models that are thriving and are very lucrative, microtransactions or multiple other things. Shubhra Gupta: How much of your attention now are you seeing yoked to the big star presence in OTT? I do believe that stars help but finally it’s just the introduction to the show. After that the show has to run on its own power. I am also known for actually walking away from the star system. I believe that one of the things that I really like about television is that it creates stars, it does not borrow stars, globally. So you pick up young, talented actors, writers, directors, and they usually make their mark on television, and then Bollywood, Hollywood, and the film industry, everyone notices them.
