English Entertainment
Discovery travel-lifestyle channel to launch in October
NEW DELHI: Discovery Networks India today announced that it would launch Discovery Travel and Living — as reported by Indiantelevision.com earlier — a new channel aimed at upper and upper-middle class audience in October.
India would be the first country where the idea of Discovery’s lifestyle portfolio would be incubated for replication in other global markets in 2005.
Today’s announcement is part of a series of other similar channel launches as outlined by Dawn L. McCall, president of Discovery Networks International, in June when he had told international media, “We saw a real opportunity in the market. A lot of people have been dabbling in (lifestyle); no one has been really willing to commit the dollars necessary to really build this segment of the business.”According to McCall, “India, with its growing and dynamic TV market and emerging middle-class, is the right place to begin Discovery Networks’ new lifestyle endeavour.”
On cue, Discovery India’s executive vice-president and MD Deepak Shourie today told journalists, “I think the time in India has come for this type of a channel.” He also added that the company hopes to “create a set of channels to take documentary (making) and non-fiction to new heights.”
The other two channels, to be formed from existing networks Discovery Travel & Adventure, Discovery H & L and Discovery Health, may be launched in India later, but Shourie did not offer any other detail. As a natural progression, some programmes that are now seen on Discovery Channel in India would migrate to the new channel.
Discovery Travel and Living will be distributed in India by One Alliance. Shourie, however, did not divulge the price of this proposed pay channel.
The company expects the channel to provide a new and unique platform for advertisers by targeting a discerning audience comprising upscale and young adults with active interests in the age group of 18-45. It is also likely to expands Discovery’s ability to attract new audiences and advertisers who have traditionally not advertised on Discovery (high-end watch companies like Tag Heur) as traditionally lifestyle advertising has been in print due
to lack of focused TV platforms, Discovery India executives claimed.
How has the Indian consumer changed? Making a presentation today, Discovery India said consumption no longer is just a function of income as there are 10 million credit card holders; disposable income has risen by over 270 per cent since 1990; dual income families are now a widespread urban phenomenon and there is a fundamental shift in consumption patterns of the Indian consumer.
“Despite the rapid growth of television industry in India, advertising spends on lifestyle brands have traditionally been restricted to the print medium,” Shourie said, adding, “Discovery Travel and Living will provide advertisers with a dynamic media vehicle to reach a well targeted and defined viewership profile.”
Some more figures to validate why Discovery Travel and Living is making its international debut in India:
In the 1990s, organised retail added 1 mn sq feet space per year.
In 2003, 10 mn sq ft was added, while in 2004-05, about 40 mn sq ft is expected to be added. According to Shourie, when his colleagues from the parent company came to India, they were taken to Gurgaon, on the outskirts of Delhi, where a mall mania is sweeping the region. “Seeing the place and the growth, they were convinced that Discovery Travel and Living should debut in India first,” Shourie said as an aside.
The new channel is targeted at upscale urban households across the country (18-20 million households by October, said Shourie) with a cosmopolitan outlook. The treatment of the channel and its programming would be aspirational, glamorous and smart.
The programming genres will include travel, health & well-being, food & cuisine, automotive & motoring, home design & décor, hobbies and outdoor leisure. “Local (Indian) programming would be introduced in 2005, which would be acquired,” Shourie added.
Some of the programmes that are likely to be seen on the new channel include Celebrity Travelogues, Globetrekker, Floyd’s India, Cooking for Love (a blind date show blended with cookery), Date Patrol, Biker Build-Off, He’s Gotta Have It, Great Vacation Homes, Superhomes, Other Peoples’ Homes, While You Were Out, The Chris Lowell Show, Tim Brooke-Taylor’s Golf Clubs and World Poker Tour.
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.
