English Entertainment
Excel Home Video looks to grow the TV DVD segment
MUMBAI: Earlier this year Excel Home Video entered the television segment. It released the first seasons of Desperate Housewives and Lost.
Encouraged by the response the company is now looking to add more titles to that list.
Speaking to Indiantelevision.com this afternoon, Excel Home Video MD MN Kapasi says, “Our focus is only on English shows as those in the SEC A and A+ segments watch them. They can thus afford to buy them. We will be releasing the second seasons of Lost and Desperate Housewives. These rights were got from Buena Vista.
“We will now be releasing seasons 1-5 of 24 as well as Prison Break and The Simpsons. These rights we got from Fox. Other titles include Boston Legal and Grey’s Anatomy. The Hindi segment is not cost effective. If you want sell a DVD of a Hindi soap like a Saas Bahu then you would have to price it cheap.
“By the end of the fiscal year March 2007 we will have eight English TV DVD titles. For the next fiscal we will add another seven to eight titles. We are looking at specialised content like aerobics and possibly adventure sports.” The television venture helps Excel build on the relationship it already has with Fox and Disney as far as films are concerned.
Excel Home Video has 1,000 English film titles on DVD. One of its latest releases has been Ice Age 2. To push it kicked off an offer in association with Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. Each DVD has a hologram. If the hologram matches the hologram shown on the channel then the consumer gets Ice Age 2 merchandise which has been imported. This way Kapasi says consumers become more aware of legal products as pirated stuff do not have holograms.
On the retail level when a consumer buys a DVD he can get an Excel VCD exchanged for a DVD and just pay the price difference. The Ice Age 2 DVD has a coupon. The consumer just has to mail the coupon. To push Ice Age 2 Excel also did wall executions in retail outlets like Planet M, Rhythm House. The dubbed version of Ice Age 2 in Hindi will be released later this month. New titles coming up are Cars, X-Men 3 and Pirates Of The Carribean 2. To push X Men 3 Excel will have ads on Pix and AXN. This too will be a hologram linked effort.
Excel also did the innovation of re – releasing the first Pirates film on DVD to coincide with the release of the sequel. It also re released the first two X Men films to coincide with the theatrical release of X Men 3. “This strategy of synergy marketing has worked well for us” adds Kapasi.
He says that 50 per cent of Excel’s above the line marketing activities are done through television. Print he adds has not really delivered. Excel not surprisingly also advertises in select multiplexes through slides as that is one place his TG frequents.
Excel has also come out with the strategy of having Movies and More outlets. This is a place where one can buy DVDs and VCDs. Right now there are 11 mostly situated in multiplexes. The plan is to increase the number to 40 by the end of the fiscal. There will also be a presence in malls.
Excel has around 30 Hindi films in its library including Dor and Lagaan. Kapasi rues the fact that there is no method in the price one pays to get the rights for a Hindi film. A producer according to him often quotes a price without looking at factors like the market size. He is hopeful that with new producers like Farhan Akhtar coming in the situation will improve.
In terms of targets he says that the company expects a 40 per cent growth in turnover for this fiscal. Bottomline growth is expected to be in the range of 18-22 per cent. The efforts of Excel have not gone unnoticed. Fox is happy about the way Ice Age 2 has fared on DVD. Fox VP intl licensees Richard Crook says, “The success has sharpened our focus on India’s growing home entertainment market. Excel Home Videos our licensee in India, has delivered a fantastic job by successfully targetting the festive holidays”.
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.
