MAM
Capital crunch: India’s media and entertainment sector battles for investor attention
MUMBAI: India’s media and entertainment sector is trapped in a paradox. High growth, high opportunity, but persistently low institutional capital. At the CII Big Picture Summit, a panel titled “Bridging the Funding Gap: Unlocking Investment for India’s M&E Sector” brought together industry veterans and investors to dissect why a sector contributing Rs 3.5 trillion struggles to attract serious money, and what needs fixing.
Shibashish Sarkar of Reliance Entertainment, chairing the session, framed the challenge starkly: a century-old industry built on private passion and private purses now needs institutional heft to scale. But the money isn’t flowing. Atul Phadnis of Vitrina AI pointed to a brutal cocktail of recent shocks: Covid’s production surge followed by a stock market hammering of media companies, Netflix’s subscriber wobbles, Hollywood strikes, and the slow-motion collapse of linear TV. Global production financing, tracked daily by Vitrina across 100 countries, shows volumes slumping to near pre-pandemic levels, with the United States weakened and government-backed markets like Germany, Japan and Brazil surging ahead.
Nicolas Granatino, president of Stem AI and backer of India’s first triple-A console game based on Indian mythology, sees untapped goldmines. “The talent here is incredible,” he said, pointing to India’s epics, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, as story worlds with global reach that remain criminally underexploited. His bet on Age of Vipara, involving Amish Tripathi and Abhita Bachchan, backs Indian IP at Hollywood quality, targeting both eastern authenticity and western novelty.
Joachim Laqueur, founding partner of 432 Legacy Ventures, argued that the real bottleneck isn’t creativity but infrastructure: rights management, audience discovery, transparent distribution. “You can create a great film with great stars, but distributing it through normal agency channels just doesn’t work anymore,” he said. His fund targets the plumbing: tools that let creators find audiences in Japan, partner with South Korea, price content intelligently and deliver returns to backers.
Anup Chandrasekhar, chief operating officer for regional content at The Epic Company, made the strongest pitch for regional markets, where 60 per cent of theatrical revenue originates. Regional cinema, he insisted, is investor-friendly if you avoid cherry-picking single films and commit to slates. Returns of 20 to 40 per cent are achievable, he claimed, but institutional funding remains scarce. Instead, producers rely on loan sharks charging 3 to 4 per cent monthly interest. “India is not Hindi. India is a constellation of regional languages,” Chandrasekhar said, urging investors to back vernacular franchises like Pushpa and niche OTT platforms catering to hyperlocal dialects and genres: Marathi theatre, micro-dramas, community-specific content.
The panel, which also featured Karan Taurani, executive vice president at Elara Capital, and Aneesh Dev, managing director of WAMIndia, agreed: the old revenue models are dead. Linear TV is a bonus, not a base. Content must be platform-agnostic, multi-revenue, multi-format. The sector isn’t dying, it’s shape-shifting.
The message to investors? Stop treating India’s media sector as a Bombay monolith. Think regional, think IP, think infrastructure. The opportunities are there. The capital, for now, is not.
Brands
IICT partners with Gativedhi to bring studio production tools to students
New MoU lets students explore AI-driven production pipelines for AVGC-XR
MUMBAI: The Indian Institute of Creative Technologies (IICT) has teamed up with Gativedhi Technologies to give students a front-row seat to modern studio production. The collaboration will integrate Gativedhi’s AI-powered production intelligence platform, Shotrack, into academic programmes, letting students experience the workflow systems used by animation, VFX and gaming studios.
Under the MoU, faculty, students and researchers will get hands-on access to Shotrack through beta programmes, pilot deployments and academic evaluations. This will allow them to explore simulated production pipelines, understand asset management, track tasks and monitor schedules, essentially seeing how complex projects come together behind the scenes.
Shotrack is designed to tackle a key industry challenge: when multiple studios work on the same project, differing internal systems often create bottlenecks, slow approvals and complicate version control. The platform provides a unified production environment, enabling smoother collaboration across distributed teams while generating operational insights and predictive analytics to optimise crew allocation, forecast schedule risks and manage costs.
The collaboration also opens doors to Gativedhi’s wider ecosystem. Upcoming tools include StudioTrack, for studio operations management covering budgeting, recruitment and IT infrastructure, and WorkTrack, which measures workflow efficiency and team productivity across industries.
IICT plans to embed these tools into programmes covering animation pipelines, VFX workflows, gaming production and media project management. Students will also benefit from guest lectures, masterclasses, workshops, internships and research projects that connect academic learning with real-world studio practices.
IICT CEO Vishwas Deoskar, said the partnership provides “An environment where production pipeline tools can be explored, tested and refined while students gain insight into how large-scale productions are organised.”
Gativedhi Technologies founder & CEO Senthil Kumar added, “This collaboration introduces students to real-world studio management tools and helps us improve our platform with academic feedback.”
With Shotrack in classrooms, India’s future animators, VFX artists and gaming producers will get a taste of studio life long before they step into one.
