English Entertainment
SPN English cluster innovations for 2018
MUMBAI: Sony Pictures Network India (SPN) is prepping to engage the world’s second largest English-speaking market where 60 per cent of the population is under 35. With an active English cluster, SPN has some global offerings for India in 2018.
It has picked up some of the best films from the biggest studios in Hollywood including Walt Disney, Universal, Warner Bros and PVR Pictures among others. SPN India’s English Entertainment cluster includes four channels catering to three genres – Sony Pix and Sony Le Plex HD for movies, AXN for English entertainment and Sony BBC Earth for English infotainment.
As per data shared by SPN for All India: NCCS 15-40 AB, Sony Pix, in the tier 1 space, is ranked second with an 18 per cent market share and time spent by viewers (TSV) of 23 minutes just behind Star Movies which has a 20 per cent market share and TSV of 24 minutes during the calendar year 2017.
SPN India classifies audiences into influencers and adopters – the influencers are the compulsive viewers, active across digital platforms and watch rated and recommended content. The adopters prefer watching TV with a relatively low awareness quotient and often seek advice on the content they need to watch.
Sony Pix reached around 34 million households in 2017. The content on the channel is curated from the top five studios in the world that included Disney, Warner Bros, NBC Universal, Sony and Lionsgate.
According to SPN India EVP of English channels Tushar Shah, the ad sales revenue for the whole of English entertainment and movies genre is upwards of Rs 700 crore. “We are extremely competitive as far as the ad rates are concerned,” says Shah. The prime time for the genre is 8-11 pm.
When asked whether the trend of content consumption on OTT has affected traditional media, Shah says that there is always a churn between different platforms around the world. But this hasn’t led to viewership shrinking. Instead, it has grown by 54 per cent for the English category between 2016 and 2017. The English movies genre overall has grown by 67 per cent in 2017. “Some of the new content which we have curated will be on the OTT platform for a period of time,” adds Shah.
“The launch of OTT has augmented the growth of TV channels in India,” says SPN India senior VP- marketing English entertainment Neville Bastawalla. SPN’s movie catalogue consists of 500 films with movies like The Fast and the Furious 8, the latest The Mummy, Despicable Me 3, which Pix will air for the first time on TV in India.
“There are no other channels in the market that offer such diverse content from the top five studios in the world,” Shah says. “Our distribution is very tight and best in the industry and is backed by excellent creative ideas and execution.”
SPN India’s premium English movie channel, Sony Le Plex HD, is at the top position with 29 per cent share in the premium category, according to the network. SPN India channels will showcase movies like Happy Death Day, Victoria and Abdul, The Red Turtle, Mary Magdalene, Dragon Heart etc.
AXN, SPN India’s twenty-year-old legacy brand, topped the charts with a 25 per cent market share and a reach of 26 million households in CY 2017, according to the network. Compared to 2016, the channel witnessed a spectacular growth of 118 per cent in viewership in 2017 claims SPN India. AXN will host the Indian television premiere of the show with two Golden Globes and eight Primetime Emmy Awards – The Handmaid’s Taleon 5 February. AXN will also have the much awaited new seasons of shows like Vikings and Billions and the return of popular reality shows such as Top Chef and Top Gears.
Sony BBC Earth is set to benefit from the quadrupling of HD subscription by 2030 according to a Chrome Data & Analytics HD report. “Sony BBC Earth airs extremely premium content. We don’t believe in thrills which are for the sake of being there and for attracting viewership. As of this week’s HD data, the channel has 14 per cent market share,” informs Shah.
BBC claims to have made the most expensive natural history series Planet Earth 2 which took three years across 40 countries. The channel has content for all types of audiences from 8 pm to 12 pm starting with science at 8 pm followed by nature and wildlife at 9 pm and adventure at 10 pm. Sony BBC Earth will air a new show Blue Planet 2, which took four years to make with underwater shooting filmed at depths of up to 8 kilometres. Apart from this, it will also cover the length and breadth of India and reveal some of its untold stories from a new perspective.
Also Read :
Content segmentation defines English entertainment, movies in 2017
Sony Pix signs content licencing deal with Warner Bros
Sony Pix and Le Plex HD brings special line-up this Christmas
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.
