English Entertainment
Get ready for an online adventure as Life of Pi premieres on Star Movies
MUMBAI: It was one of the highest grossing Hollywood films in India in 2012. Now, as Life of Pi is slated for a TV premiere soon on Star Movies, the channel has come up with an innovative experiment to involve the viewers. Having acquired the telecast rights of the Oscar-winning film directed by Ang Lee, Star Movies will premiere the film on Sunday, 27 October at 1:00 pm and 9:00 pm. The channel is leaving no stone unturned to create the right buzz around the movie that will be broadcast as part of their most distinguished slot – “Hollywood Premiere”.
To engage the audience well, the channel is using the interactive power of the digital medium to reach out to its audience by launching an experiential online journey based on the movie. “Most of the film has been shot in India and has Indian stars. Since we really believe that the premiere will fetch good results in the Indian market, we are planning a strategy that can pull more audience,” says Star Network (English channels) general manager Kevin Vaz, informing about an online game, “Life of I” that they are launching before the premiere of the film.
The game invites viewers to experience the journey of a lifetime through the lens of Pi. The participants can log in to the game via Facebook where they have the chance to map out their own journey based on the events that transpire in the movie. The game has eight milestones. A player who crosses all the milestones becomes eligible for a trip to landmark locations where Life of Pi was shot – including Puducherry, Munnar and Taiwan, in addition to other prizes. A person who plays the entire game will also get a personalised video of their journey that will comprise a part of their Facebook journey. The video acts as a memoir of their journey as they live in real life their own version of the movie.
Kevin says that the channel has taken the entire initiative to plan the trip for the winners. “We haven’t roped in travelling partners. We will be doing it on our own,” he adds.
“Not just this, to create enough buzz, we have also created special videos shot with the stars of the movie that will give the audience an insight into the film’s making, with anecdotes that happened during the shooting of the film,” says Kevin, who thinks that an extra effort has to be made in order to get more audience and survive in the world of cut-throat competition. “Whenever we have made an extra effort to promote a show or a film, it has reaped good results. Case in point, the Academy Awards, which we promoted across mediums with new initiatives, gave us many viewers,” says Kevin, who thinks that very soon such efforts will be made with all big movie premieres.
UK: The aerial is losing its grip. As broadband becomes the default way Britons watch television, the UK is edging towards a decisive, and divisive, question: should Freeview be switched off by 2034? The issue, highlighted in reporting by The Guardian, has exposed deep fault lines over access, affordability and the future of public service broadcasting.
For nearly 25 years, Freeview has delivered free-to-air television from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 to almost every corner of the country. Even now, it remains the UK’s largest TV platform, used in more than 16m homes and on around 10m main household sets. Yet the same broadcasters that built it are now pressing for its closure within eight years.
Their case rests on a structural shift in viewing. Smart TVs, superfast broadband and the Netflix-led streaming boom have pulled audiences online. Advertising economics have followed. By 2034, the number of homes using Freeview as their main TV set is forecast to fall from a peak of almost 12m in 2012 to fewer than 2m, making digital terrestrial television, or DTT, increasingly costly to sustain.
But critics say the rush to switch off risks abandoning those least able, or least willing, to move online.
“I don’t want to be choosing apps and making new accounts,” says Lynette, 80, from Kent. “It is time-consuming and irritating trying to work out where I want to be, to remember the sequence of clicks, with hieroglyphics instead of words. If I make a mistake I have to start again.”
Lynette is among nearly 100,000 people who have signed a “save Freeview” petition launched by campaign group Silver Voices. She fears the government is about to “take [Freeview] away from me and others who either don’t like, can’t afford, or can’t use online versions”.
Official figures underline the fault lines. A report commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport estimates that by 2035, 1.8m homes will still depend on Freeview. Ofcom’s analysis shows those households are more likely to be disabled, older, living alone, female, and based in the north of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Freeview is owned by the public service broadcasters through Everyone TV, which also operates Freesat and the newer streaming platform Freely. After two years of review, DCMS is expected to set out its position soon, drawing on three options proposed by Ofcom: a costly upgrade of Freeview’s ageing technology; maintaining a bare-bones service with only core PSB channels; or a full switch-off during the 2030s.
The broadcasters have rallied behind the third option. They argue that 2034 is the logical cut-off, when transmission contracts with network operator Arqiva expire. By then, they say, the cost of broadcasting to a dwindling audience will far outweigh the returns from TV advertising.
Ofcom agrees a crunch point is approaching. In July, the regulator warned of a “tipping point” within the next few years, after which it will no longer be commercially viable for broadcasters to carry the costs of DTT.
Others see risks beyond economics. Questions remain over whether internet TV can reliably deliver emergency broadcasts, such as the daily Covid updates, in the way that universally available DTT can. The UK radio industry has also warned that an internet-only future for TV could push up distribution costs and force some radio stations off air if PSBs no longer share Arqiva’s mast network.
“It is a political hot potato,” says Dennis Reed, founder of Silver Voices, who says he has “dissociated” his organisation from the government’s stakeholder forum, which he believes is “heavily biased” towards streaming.
The Future TV Taskforce, representing the PSBs, counters that moving online could “close the digital divide once and for all”. “We want to be able to plan to ensure that no one is left behind,” a spokesperson says, adding that rising DTT costs could otherwise mean cuts to programme budgets.
The numbers show the scale of the challenge. Of the 1.8m Freeview-dependent homes projected for 2035, around 1.1m are expected to have broadband but not use it for TV. The remaining 700,000 are forecast to lack a broadband connection altogether.
Veterans of the analogue switch-off, completed in 2012 after 76 years, recall similar fears of “TV blackout chaos”. Around 6 per cent of households were labelled “digital refuseniks”, yet a targeted help scheme and a national campaign, fronted by a robot called Digit Al voiced by Matt Lucas, delivered a largely smooth transition.
This time, the BBC is less keen to foot the bill. Tim Davie, the outgoing director general, has said the corporation should not fund a comparable support programme for a Freeview switch-off.
Research for Sky by Oliver & Ohlbaum suggests that with early awareness campaigns and digital inclusion measures, only about 330,000 households would ultimately need hands-on help ahead of a 2034 shutdown.
Meanwhile, viewing habits continue to fragment. Audience body Barb says 7 per cent of UK households no longer own a TV set, choosing to watch on other devices. In December, YouTube overtook the BBC’s combined channels in total UK viewing across TVs, smartphones and tablets, albeit measured at a minimum of three minutes.
That shift may accelerate. YouTube has recently blocked Barb and its partner Kantar from accessing viewing session data, limiting transparency just as online platforms consolidate power.
“When the government chose British Satellite Broadcasting as the ‘winner’ in satellite TV it was Rupert Murdoch’s Sky instead that came out on top,” says a senior TV executive quoted by The Guardian. “There already is such an outsider ready to be the winner in the transition to internet TV; it is YouTube.”
Freeview’s future now hangs on a familiar British dilemma: modernise fast and risk exclusion, or protect universality and pay the price. Either way, the aerial’s days as king of the living room look numbered.
