English Entertainment
Niche English channels use innovative packaging promos to grab eyeballs in the 10-11pm slot
The late night slot (10-11 pm) has over the past few months grown in importance for niche English channels. This has resulted in a rearranging of strategy. In this special report Indiantelevision.com looks at their strategies as well as performance in recent times. TAM data taken is for the six metros for the period 27 April to 3 May for all C&S homes.
English General Entertainment Channels: Zee English, despite having the platform driver Friends from Monday-Thursday has a share of 0.03. Star World is way ahead at 0.11. Keep in mind the fact that the channel revamp had not yet taken place. AXN is in second place with a share of 0.07. The weekend sees all three practically doubling their share.
If you only take SEC AB for the four major metros the picture shifts, for the period 30 March till 26 April in the 10-10:30 pm slot Monday to Thursday Zee English is ahead with a share of 0.42 and a TVR of 0.13. AXN has a share of 0.19 and TVR of 0.05. Star World is in third place with a share of 0.07 and a TVR of 0.02 in that slot.
 AXN assistant VP, marketing, Rohit Bhandari |
AXN assistant vice president, marketing, Sony, Rohit Bhandari pointed out that there is no point trying to counter the popularity of soaps. ” Nine out of ten people watch them anyway. What we did was to change our programme slot. Since films are leisurely in nature we shifted them onto the weekends. So now you have four films airing on Saturday and Sunday instead of just two earlier.”
“From 8 April we brought our Prime Zone up from 8 pm to 10 pm on weekdays. Our audience starts building from 8:30 pm -11 pm. At 10 pm one can see high profile shows like 24 and CSI III,” Bhandari however, added “It is too soon to see if there has been any change in viewership on account of this.” The channel‘s primetime peak occurs late in the evening.
Zee English has been revamping its strategy for several months now. The channels programming head Ashvini Yardi said, “As early as July 2002, based on in-house research and viewer feedback, we had introduced the LOL (laugh out loud) band around the popular comedies in the channel from 9 pm to 11 pm.
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| AXN building the buzz with 24 |
In the 10 – 11 pm band, the platform driver is Friends, at 10 pm from Mondays to Thursdays. On all weekdays we have popular Dramas at the 10:30 pm slot.” These come in the form of Will and Grace, She Spies and political drama The West Wing. Dwelling on efforts being made to counter the impact of popular soaps in the 10-11 pm slot Yardi said, “On an experiential level we are constantly innovating to offer viewers a unique brand experience. At the operational level this will translate into setting trends and offering cherry picked properties that are critically acclaimed, diverse, and popular and the latest.” Zee English will introduce the critically acclaimed black comedy Six Feet Under from tonight at 9:30 pm.
Tripathi also dwelt on the issue of promotions and advertising being used to lure audiences saying that a mix of cinema, advertising on other TV channels, programme guides, direct mailers and consumer contests are used to promote the channel and the specific time bands. Late Night Discovery is currently sponsored by Maruti and other advertisers include Godrej Appliances, Emirates, Mahindra, Pizza Hut, Britannia, ICICI Bank, Titan, Yamaha, Nokia, Ford, Liberty, Hitachi, Oriental Insurance and Hutch amongst others.
 Zee English, Zee MGM head Ashvini Yardi |
“Our target audience is the upwardly mobile, 25 + adults. Our programming is such that couples can watch Late Night Discovery together and the programming is not gender specific” Tripathi said.
Finally, despite repeated efforts, Indiantelevision.com was unable to obtain a response from National Geographic.
English Movie Channels: Once again there is a sharp contrast for the figures on weekdays versus the weekend. On weekdays HBO‘s share is marginally ahead of Star Movies at 1.09 versus 0.95. On weekends however Star Movies gallops away at a share of 3.2 versus 0.61 for HBO.
Star Movies continues ruling the roost. TAM data for six
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| Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson‘s antics saw Star Movies bulldoze the competition on Friday night |
metros from 1 Jan till 26 April reveals that eight of the top ten English movies belonged to it. The Jackie Chan western comedy Shanghai Noon which premiered last month made Star Movies the top performing English language channel and the third most popular channel in Indian cable homes across the crucial Friday night 9-11pm time band.
Hallmark despite innovations like the reality series Adoption continues to struggle to carve its own niche. It‘s share on weekdays is a meagre 0.02. This goes up to 0.04 on the weekend. Zee MGM fares better with a shares of 0.25 and 0.39 respectively.
HBO meanwhile is continuing on its path of introducing innovative time slots like Kings of Kungfu and Double Trouble where movies starring two action heroes air. Asked if there was any recent change in strategy, HBO South Asia marketing head Shruti Bajpai in an earlier interview had said, “Not really. There is no point in making changes to a formula that is working very well for us.”
Explaining Zee MGM‘s strategy Yardi said, “Zee MGM, last year embarked on the universally successful format of airing genre-based movies. It introduced five fixed and two variable slots every week. These variable slots were introduced at the primetime bands of 9 -11.
Like in the case of Zee English, this again was the result of comparing and analysing our research findings, which pointed out to some inherent channel strengths that ensured better viewership during this time band. The top of the line slot is Romantic Mondays and Man Fridays and in these slots the channel share has gone up by thrice as much in recent times
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| Winona Ryder and Anjelina Jolie square off in HBO‘s Girl Interrupted |
“Our efforts rest in innovatively packaging existing and new titles to suit varying user tastes, which we think are as important as introducing fresh and exciting titles to constantly spruce up the offering. We constantly introduce titles like Run Lola Run which is so to say not mainline Hollywood stuff but are critically acclaimed. Hence this way we strive to satisfy the auteur as well,” Yardi says.
Yardi elaborated on the weekend strategy thus, “The weekend viewer is relaxed yet focused. Taking this aspect into account, our major titles in Zee MGM are put during the 9 – 11 pm slot believing that the nature of the viewer allows him to make prior appointments with programmes.”
When asked about the audience being targeted Yardi said, “Our target audience today mainly comprise of the English speaking audience in the metros and the mini metros. (15-34 Sec A, B) As far as our viewer profile is concerned we have as many men viewers as women. They are an eclectic mix of people who are affluent, aspirational and life-style oriented. Their propensity to spend is high and they spend more on life style goods.
“Viewership patterns change all the time owing to the ever-growing popularity of English as a language and also other social and economic factors. However, our efforts are to transcend ‘specific demographics‘ and be a mass content channel of all the English speaking and English thinking populace in India. We think that our combination of mass appeal and superlative programmes will appeal to this changing viewership patterns.”
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.
