English Entertainment
Advantage Modis in Disney Channel row
NEW DELHI/MUMBAI: Walt Disney has got caught in the battle of swadeshi vs videshi as far as government permission for the Disney Channel is concerned in India. Its Indian partner, the KK Modi group, has invoked its right to say no to a no-objection for a Disney subsidiary in India for the kid’s channel.
Citing Press Note 18 (which states that a foreign company ought to have a no-objection for a wholly-owned subsidiary, operating in the same or related areas, from its Indian joint venture partner if it had one), what the Modis have argued is that Walt Disney’s proposed wholly-owned subsidiary was in direct conflict with the existing joint venture and so a no-objection could not be given unless Disney agreed to partner with them again for the kids channel also.
Walt Disney, the second largest media company in the world after AOL Time Warner, has a 50:50 joint venture company with the Modi group. This JV – Buena Vista – is a TV, software, production and distribution company and holds the rights to Disney products in India. One of the arguments that Disney had put forth was that apart from the existing joint venture, its earlier agreement with Modi Entertainment Network, another Modi group company, was for a free to air Disney channel. Now that Disney proposed to bring the kids’ channel as a pay-per-view channel, the whole business plan has undergone a change and, hence, the Modis should have no objection to issuing an NOC.
Lalit Modi, president and managing director, Modi Enterprises, however, says the status of the matter was clear in April itself, which was when the information and broadcasting ministry had indicated its thinking on the issue. Still, Walt Disney can re-apply for permission from the government after making changes in its application, according to government officials.
Queried as to what could be the fallout of all this and whether this put paid to the possibility of Disney launching its 24-hour children’s channel in India, Modi said that the two sides could still sit across the table and come to some agreement. Modi said the subject would be discussed in the next meeting between the JV partners. According to Modi, the situation at this juncture was that if Disney wanted to bring its channel bypassing the existing agreement, then it would have to either buy out the stake of the Indian partners or else air non-Disney software on any channel it might bring into the country.
For the time being therefore, The Disney Channel (TDC) has hit a roadblock, as reported in the Hindu Business Line today.
This comes almost a year after the company moved the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) in October 2001. Though an initial go-ahead was received from the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) in January this year, a final decision against the proposal was reportedly taken only last week.
The FIPB, under the DIPP, was informed by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B), the administrative Ministry in this case, that it cannot support Walt Disney’s proposal to launch The Disney Channel.
According to government sources, the I&B Ministry’s decision was taken after consideration of the guidelines issued by the Ministry of Commerce, including Press Note 18 of 1998.
The Indian partners have been opposing Disney’s proposal for setting up a 100 per cent subsidiary and launching of Disney Channel on grounds that the businesses of the existing joint venture company and the proposed wholly-owned subsidiary are similar. The US company has, however, refuted this.
Earlier, in January this year, FIPB had permitted Walt Disney to launch the Disney Channel with riders that the new wholly-owned subsidiary will not be permitted to undertake activities that is already being undertaken by the joint venture company.
Walt Disney later made representations against the riders which were forwarded to the I&B Ministry for its comments.
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.
