iWorld
2020 and the debate of TV vs digital video
MUMBAI: It’s been two decades since I have been listening, participating and speaking about the great inflection point in digital in India. Every five years with some growth in consumer usage of the internet, adoption of platforms and growing online shopping, the claim used to only add fuel. Further to tons of VC money going into start-ups, every third person used to say “Digital Inflection Point” has truly arrived in India.
So, I am kind of tired of this whole story, but wait… 2020 has been that year when the digital inflection point truly arrived. I say it with total conviction, data points and authority as a media agency head, based on what I am seeing on the ground and how clients have responded to the turning landscape and massive consumer behavior changes happening around us.
VCs invest in ideas for the future and 90 per cent of them fail but the ones that stick, address the growing need when the inflection point arrives, solving a problem and making the business viable because the business has a purpose. Purpose of disseminating information or spreading joy through entertainment or enabling healthcare in remote places or bringing education to people’s homes or even making financial transactions simpler.
This would not be possible without the technology that could back the high-speed internet required for addressing any of the purposes I have mentioned above. India as a country still has affordability issues. So, when the high-speed internet became affordable, consumer intent naturally swayed towards cheaper options, making viewability of content agnostic in nature.
That is the only true reason why I believe that the inflection point has arrived and it’s here to not just stay but grow exponentially. Now how does that translate to comparing digital video to TV?
TV is known as the idiot box and it will continue to be one. Mobile will be known as an idiot brick, but these idiotic products are the only mediums that enable communication with the latter being a two-way mechanism of communication at the highest levels.
Indians have consumed AV since the early fifties through movies, which was later followed by terrestrial TV, then the VCR wave settled in with cable TV from early nineties. Indians are emotional and therefore anything that brings in emotional highs has always worked, which is why entertainment as an industry is so large in India. Naturally, the progression would be towards affordable consumption, and high-speed internet did just that. It enabled consumption of the ever-growing content from emotional to comedy to dramatic to romantic to edgy to sexual to the next level. Add to that social media, where you could be a star with millions of followers generating income for the content you create, made the medium even more adoptable for creators and stickier for the consumers.
We haven’t even spoken about cricket here!
Add to that the pandemic in 2020, every aspect of consumption soared, and India’s favorite pastime now made its entry into the idiot bricks or what we call mobile phones. Everything changed and I am going to quickly explain how the growth of mobile internet actually grew the market and did not take away the share from TV.
I recently met an MD of a very large financial institution with my team and we started talking about how OTT is taking away the share from TV in terms of reach and I begged to differ with him because the data that I am narrating shows that not only has TV grown in size and consumption, but digital video has also in fact created newer audiences, thereby breaking the myth of OTT taking over TV in the future.
India is the second largest television market in the world with 195 Million households of which 80 per cent are paid C&S channels, which makes it a subscription market for TV at around 156 million as per Statista. As per BARC, TV viewership grew by 10 per cent in 2020 over 2019 (consolidated – urban + rural, Jan – Nov). India is looking at a projected revenue generation of $3 billion from TV as an industry through advertising in FY 21.
Despite the growth in C&S, digital advertising is going to overtake TV advertising in FY 21 with a projected revenue of $3.5 billion. As per KPMG, the 20 per cent drop from projections is largely the dismal economic situation due to the Covid 19 pandemic but what that did was to enable the massive adoption of OTT and grew the whole base of paid subscribers which will cross 40 million in FY 21 fueling the growth of digital advertising northwards.
There are standing examples of these claims with the release of movies on OTT and its subsequent adoption, IPL on Hotstar which saw unprecedented growth reaching over 300 million handheld devices and the ever-growing connected TV story, for which Samsung is gearing up to provide solutions on advertising in the near future.
With an average of $10 in subscriptions, we are estimating paid subscription revenue on OTT to be around $400M which clearly indicates that consumers are willing to pay to consume more and more video content. Players to watch out for in 2021 will be YouTube, Hotstar, Instagram Reels, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Zee5, SonyLiv, MX Player, Ullu, Hoichoi and SunNext.
If TikTok makes a comeback then it will see tremendous adoption but there are players like Josh who are taking that space up quickly, so while OTT consumption will continue to grow, social video sharing apps are also now part of the same mix when it comes to content consumption if it has to be classified as digital video.
So, my humble submission therefore is, “inflection point” has truly arrived in 2020 and was accelerated by the pandemic, which is why in FY 21, digital advertising will overtake television advertising and while TV is seeing growth in viewership, it is declining in revenues due to the drop of 20 per cent in advertising spends again due to the pandemic that impacted our economy on the whole. TV and OTT are parts of the same coin as heads and tails are. Hence, while we see OTT adoption is growing at a rapid pace, it will necessarily not replace TV anytime soon. OTT behavior is in silos except when on connected TVs and television viewing is typically family driven, again a big difference in consumer behavior thus making a niche for both these mediums which is why I continue to believe that OTT as disruption has increased the overall size of audience and not taken away share from TV. Therefore, both these mediums will co-exist in India for some time to come, period!
(The author is managing partner at DDB Mudra Group and is responsible for the media business. )
Gaming
MTG gaming chief Benninghoff joins NODWIN board as esports firm primes for IPO
The Gurugram-based esports firm is pursuing a public listing, has returned to profitability and is growing revenues by 42 per cent
GURUGRAM: NODWIN Gaming is moving fast. The Gurugram-based gaming and esports company has launched a pre-IPO fundraising round, appointed UBS as lead adviser for both the round and a subsequent public listing, and landed a heavyweight board director, all in one go.
The new board member is Arnd Benninghoff, executive vice president of gaming at Stockholm-listed Modern Times Group (MTG), who has overseen the group’s strategic investments and portfolio growth since 2014. He is no stranger to building things: Benninghoff has founded and built fifteen companies, served as chief digital officer at ProSiebenSat.1 Media AG, managing director of SevenVentures, and chief executive of Holtzbrinck eLAB. He began his career as a journalist at Deutsche Presse Agentur and various TV networks, holds a Diplom-Kaufmann in business and administration from the University of Münster, and previously sat on the board of Edgeware AB.
The numbers back the ambition
NODWIN is not pitching a story without substance. The company has returned to EBITDA profitability and posted a 42 per cent year-on-year revenue surge, reaching $58.5m in the first nine months of FY2026. The pre-IPO round will combine a primary issuance to fund global expansion through organic growth and acquisitions, alongside a secondary sale to give existing shareholders some liquidity.
Akshat Rathee, co-founder and managing director of NODWIN Gaming, said Benninghoff understands “the entire lifecycle of the gaming and media ecosystem, from the boots-on-the-ground reality of building startups to the strategic complexity of managing multi-billion dollar global portfolios.”
Benninghoff, for his part, said the company “sits at the intersection of sports, entertainment, and technology, making it one of the most exciting players in the global gaming landscape today.”
A portfolio built for the global south
Founded in 2014 by Rathee and Gautam Virk, NODWIN has quietly assembled one of the more compelling esports portfolios outside the Western hemisphere. Its properties include DreamHack India and Comic Con India, and it recently acquired StarLadder, the Ukraine-based tournament organiser behind premier events in CS:GO and Dota 2. The company also serves as a long-term strategic marketing partner for the Evolution Championship Series (EVO), the world’s most prominent fighting game tournament, helping push it into new geographies.
Its geographic focus spans South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Backers include Nazara Technologies, KRAFTON, Sony Group Corporation, JetSynthesys, and the founders’ investment vehicle Good Game Investments.
What comes next
With UBS running the books, a board freshly reinforced with European media and gaming expertise, and revenue heading in the right direction, NODWIN is laying the groundwork deliberately. The esports industry has burned investors before with big promises and thin margins. NODWIN’s return to profitability, combined with a real portfolio of owned intellectual properties across gaming, music and youth culture, gives it a more credible runway than most. The IPO clock is now ticking.
