English Entertainment
We place a very high premium on fan experience: Turner’s Rohit Bhandari
MUMBAI: Competition has brought the best out of the TV channels operating in the English movie genre. With 14 channels vying for the crown, the genre has witnessed a flurry of changes in programming strategy and content aggregation as well as viewer-engagement manoeuvres. In the quest for curating quality content, increasing the fan base and expanding the target audience, channels are in the race to bag rights for premieres and beefing up their content library. The viewership for the genre has been reasonably steady through the year even as the yearning for the consumption of movies increases on over-the-top (OTT) platforms.
Turner India senior director and network head- English entertainment Rohit Bhandari feels that there is no empirical data that proves any cannibalisation of viewership. They are currently driving all the strategies towards making the television-viewing experience an almost personal and incredible one rather than diverging into OTT for now.
Both HBO and WB are available across all the DTH operators and key national networks and MSOs across India. Turner India is planning to strengthen its line-up of premieres for the year 2018, which will have movies from big studios like Warner Bros and Paramount and help in reaching the goals.
Bhandari, in an interaction with Indiantelevision.com, said that the network intends to deepen the relationship with its fans by not only by expanding the content library but also by giving them more meaningful experiences through innovative ways by which they can participate and engage with its brands.
Edited excerpts:
What are your plans, innovations and strategies for 2018 for your English movies channels?
We are a fan-first company, and our strategy for HBO and WB reflects our viewer-centric approach. Our plans are centered around growing and super servicing our fans, the successful execution of which will ultimately help us to achieve higher ratings and in turn enable us to deliver bigger advertising revenues. Through interesting content and continuous engagement with the audience, we intend to build upon the strong fan-base we have. This, of course, would be aimed at increasing the total number of viewers and increasing our revenue share.
Ted Turner once famously said, ‘Just because your ratings are bigger doesn’t mean you’re better.’ We are driven by the same thought. While ranks are important and we are constantly monitoring what’s happening with the genre, we’re focused on being better. We are taking a `Kaizen’ approach to everything that we do. We look to improve continuously with not just our content acquisitions but also with our distribution, marketing and communication plans.
We place a very high premium on the fan experience and we look for opportunities to create an environment that our viewers have come to expect from our brands and delivering that experience.
Will there be a change in the programming line-up this year?
In 2018 our fans can expect an even stronger line up of premieres. A line-up from Warner Bros and Paramount Studios that we now will help drive our reach and expansion goals. While we started the year with a bang, with the premiere of Kong: Skull Island, we have some great titles lined up for the year such as Wonder Woman, Transformers: The Last Knight, Baywatch, Dunkirk, Justice League to name a few. Creatively curated together from an extensive library of ever-popular hit titles in our library, we are confident of keeping and growing our fans with this great line-up.
What is your current target group?
The core target group that English Movies seeks is 16-30 years, with some spillover happening at both ends of the age spectrum. However, from a BARC measurement point of view, we evaluate our brands on 1 Mn+ markets, 15-40 age group, NCCS A audiences.
We will expand this fan-base by empathising with our viewers. In 2017, we interacted with fans by using languages and mediums that they were most comfortable with viz. social media and instant messaging like WhatsApp. The idea of interacting with their favourite movie channel in real time generated a lot of excitement for our fans and created great value for us in terms of pure engagement and feedback. This almost personal experience with the brand is what we will be continuing with, going into 2018, thereby widening the fan pool.
Is there any change in the prime time band?
Our strategy around prime time band remains the same as last year. We follow a differentiated strategy during weekdays and over weekends. Given that weekdays are busy times for people, we play more of the action oriented blockbuster titles as the viewer is looking for a quick fix and blockbusters offer them an easy entry into the film. However, the weekends allow us to expose more of our library to our viewers. With 1 pm and 9 pm being the key slots which are reserved for popular titles, the other slots like 11 am, 3 pm, 7 pm etc. allow us to play a variety of titles across genres.
In terms of viewership, how are the channels performing?
With its brand promise of Experience The Magic, HBO focuses on presenting its viewers with some of the biggest blockbusters from Hollywood and we ensure that our loyal fans are provided the best in movie entertainment and with our exciting and highly popular library. HBO continues to be amongst the top performing movie channels in India.
Youth brands and male brands dominate our channels. Auto, mobile handset, e-commerce and IT products are key categories.
With increasing digital content consumption, are you planning to launch an OTT platform?
‘Experience The Magic’ is an intended consumer experience that we want consumers to feel every time that they engage with HBO. Given the variety of choices available to the consumer today, we realise that it is important to convert our consumer from a viewer into a fan, and the only way of doing that is putting the fan at the center of everything. A majority of fans in the multi-tiered Indian market love the experience of films – visual as well as audio – that television brings them, and we are currently driving all our strategies towards making this television-viewing experience an almost personal, incredible one rather than diverging into OTT for now.
What are your marketing and promotional strategies for the new content?
Our industry is evolving and consumers demand not just choice – which they already have a lot of – but also convenience, value and more than just great content. They are also looking for unique experiences. Which explains why we at Turner have a fan-first strategy and been so focused on fan experiences. This transcends further into our promotional and marketing strategies for new content. For example, for our recent premiere of Kong: Skull Island, we made the experience even more special for fans, with HBO and HBO HD releasing cool ‘Stand with Kong’ filter available on Facebook camera filters. Fans could use the filter for a cool picture that would visually bring them face to face with Kong himself. Further, we also created a unique Facebook SmartApp, so fans could see how they measure up to the gigantic legend. This was accompanied by exciting contests on HBO’s social platforms.
All major titles throughout the year will see similar strategies that bring fans closer to experiencing the magic.
Has the trend of watching movies on OTT platforms affected business?
We believe that even though OTT is growing, TV will continue to be the main source of entertainment for a majority of the audience in the Indian market. It is a multi-tiered market, and for OTT to have a significant impact on TV viewership, there needs to be economic affordability and the access to good bandwidth. Also, the experience of television, which complements the largeness of a film and its effects, cannot be compared to that of OTT. Over the last couple of years, our ratings have been rather stable and while there certainly has been higher acceptance to the various OTT players, there is no empirical data that proves any cannibalisation of viewership.
Do you think ad revenue will pick-up this year?
HBO as a brand is iconic that advertisers have appreciated and respected over the years. With the launch of HBO HD coupled with its new look, we saw a steady positive response from advertisers in the last couple of years.
2017 was a challenging year for everyone with demonetisation and GST implementation. 2018 has opened far better and we expect to see a pickup from March onwards. A trend we hope will strengthen even further.
HBO is perceived as an aspirational brand, identified with big premieres, large blockbuster titles and hence, has always commanded a very strong premium on rates over competition.
2018’s exciting lineup has piqued advertiser interest. At the end of the day, advertisers need some big vehicles to get their brands onto and this year HBO has the right mix of titles to attract some of the biggest brands and advertisers.
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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.
