English Entertainment
France looks to partner entertainment sector in India
MUMBAI: The French are coming. And in a manner never seen before. That too in the Indian entertainment sector with a focus on cinema.
Says French Ambassador in India Dominique Girard: “We are quite serious about India. We believe the timing is right. India is no longer an exotic place alone, it is culturally integrated with the rest of the world, it has also emerged as a nation of economic power. And a country which has lots of technical expertise and skills.”
For starters, the French Embassy has set up an office in Mumbai right in the heart of Bollywood with the head of the film and TV department Mohammed Bendjebbour leading the charge of the French film brigade. Earlier, Bendjebbour was stationed in Delhi with a couple of people under him. The Mumbai office will have a similar component of people under him.
“Bendejebbour and his team will assist Indian film producers in every way they can to help them should they want to do anything relating to cinema in France,” says Girard.
Girard points out that additionally, a new film cooperating treaty between India and France is being penned right now. “The French film authorities met with the Information & Ministry officials at the Goa Film festival and agreed to rejuvenate the 1985 treaty on cinema. It is currently being drafted and will be signed at the Cannes film Festival this May with India celebrating its 60th year of independence,” says Girard.
Girard believes it is about time Indian film makers move away from their traditional overseas locations like Switzerland, New Zealand, Malayasia and use France’s “magnifique locales” for filming just as Don had its opening sequence shot in Paris.
“We have fabulous monuments – the Eiffel Tower, the Notre Dame de Paris, the Champs Elysees – which can serve as interesting backdrops,” says he. “The French are not too finicky about permitting filming in them. You remember Mittal and the Chateau de Versailles. In fact, we had organized a visit for Yash Chopra earlier this year to the Chateau in the wee hours of the morning and he was quite excited by it.”
The French Embassy is taking steps to ensure that Indian film producers wanting to film in France are given preferential treatment in terms of visas. “Unlike IT and other professions, film professionals will only need a business visa to film in France. And the head of the TV and film department will help making life easier for them.”
He points out that a step in that direction was taken when the Accor group of hotels and the French Tourism Promotion Board signed an agreement permitting Indian film crews to fly in their cooks with them and use the kitchens on the premises to rustle up Indian vegetarian fare for them. “This should be really beneficial to those who are vegetarian, we were told it is a major issue with many film people.”
Girard reveals that he has ambitions to make French cinema popular in India. “The multiplex culture has made it viable for distributors and exhibitors to screen French movies. The feedback we have received from Indian youth is that they would love to watch the new wave of French cinema,” says Girard.
Thus there are plans are to have festivals of French cinema; and dub French films into various Indian languages. For starters Skyfighters – a Top Gun kind of French film – which is being distributed by the PVR group is to be released with a Tamil, Telugu, Hindi and English dub. “The French Embassy is setting aside funds for dubs if distributors are willing to distribute French films,” reveals Girard.
That’s some red carpet treatment. Now it’s up to the Indian film trade to take the bait.
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.
