English Entertainment
Romedy Now banks on popular 90s’ sitcom ‘Friends’
MUMBAI: “How you doin’?” means much more than just a greeting to people who grew up watching Friends. The iconic show about the six friends and their lives is back on the small screen.
Speaking on the reason behind airing the sitcom, the channel’s marketing head Shantanu Gangane says, “Friends is an iconic series which has a huge fan following even today. The synergy of the show matches perfectly well with our core channel proposition of ‘Love and Laughter’ and we are certain that the viewers will enjoy the 10 back to back seasons of Friends. With the soaring popularity of the channel and with a unique line up of movies and series, this series couldn’t have found a better destination to enthrall its fans.”
Romedy Now English Entertainment Channels content head Mansi Shrivastav adds, “When you look at a viewer who is switching it on, he’s not really looking at something with a telescope of time. It’s not sort of confined to whether it is old or it is new. We brought back Chaplin, which was made during The Little Renaissance (1910s), so there’s certain kind of content which is eternal. Friends is one of those; and since we are a channel which is all about love and laughter, we didn’t think twice while acquiring it.”
“Friends is a direct fit in terms of the synergy and the brand. We may even brink back content which is 20-30 years old, but the intent will always remain to make sure that it is within the umbrella of love and laughter,” informs Shrivastav.
About the timeslot chosen for the series Mondays to Thursdays 8 pm to 9 pm, Shrivastav says that it would only benefit the brand whilst giving the viewers what they need. “With the older show, it’s more about viewing it together. There’s a lot of binge-viewing that the country is doing. People are watching things all together. It is a show which does well anyway; it is a show which will benefit from being clubbed together as opposed to playing a half hour. Not only, are we airing the series from Mondays to Thursdays, we are also airing a marathon of all the episodes aired during the week on Saturday afternoon. It’s definitely that the consumers want, but for us as well it works because, we are giving one full hour of love and laughter into two different kinds of shows, with different kinds of library content versus premiere content.”
Gangane adds, “Airing the show at 8 pm somehow fits in very well with our scheme of things, of the TG really. Also, the numbers happen to stack up over there in terms of TAM numbers, we have the highest People Using TV (PUT) at that time. So, we’ve seen a fairly large amount of critical mass of the TG at that amount of time, on the entire category, which is English GECS’.”
With no title sponsor on board yet, the show is powered by Gionee Smartphones India. Romedy Now, part of Times Television Network, has acquired the exclusive broadcast rights to the show at a significant cost. According to Gangane, the brand’s TG is 15+, but that’s “more of a business bracket, than a content bracket.”
On whether marketing a series which is decade old was a daunting task, Gangane points out, “It was very important for us to go into the medium, talk that language and find the best way to contemporise Friends. You cannot really dish out the content from a manufacturer’s way and say that ‘great, Friends has launched, please come and watch it’. You have to contemporise it in various ways; so, one is the hashtags that we’ve created like #TGIF, #ToughestFriendsQuiz; then we’ve also come out with a contest. So, it was to do with having a consumer angle to this entire activation rather than really have another mother promo.”
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Romedy Now used #ToughestFriendsQuiz which was trending across the nation on the first day of its launch. People themselves have created memes and hashtagged Romedy Now and #TGIF.
Apart from this, the channel through an exciting contest will be giving a chance to the biggest fans of the sitcom to go to LA and have coffee at the real ‘Central Perk’. The fans have to vote for their favourite character to win this.
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Says a media veteran, “Just because Romedy Now is airing Friends in HD, it is not that big a deal. The viewers, such as myself, have seen it quite a few times on Star World or Zee Cafe. For me, it’s just a repeat show, there’s no excitement. Right now, people are savvy about the current shows… they download it as soon as it is aired abroad. Watching a TV Show is not like watching a movie, which you can repeat as many times, and still have people watching and enjoying it.”
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.
