English Entertainment
Zee Cafe targets 20-40-yr-olds with BBC First drama
MUMBAI: Zee’s English entertainment channel Zee Café has partnered with BBC Worldwide to bring award-winning premium British drama to its audience. Starting from 26 June, the channel will host BBC First content block with 11 new shows set to air every weeknight at 10pm time slot.
The channel has an ongoing deal with BBC for two years. For the Indian audience, the channel will bring another set of 16 British shows shortly.
The new line-up of shows on Zee Café, the main sponsor of which is Nexa , includes: War & Peace, Fleming: The Man who would be Bond, Class, SS-GB, Maigret, Doctor Foster, Top of the Lake, The Kettering Incident, New Blood, From Darkness and Thirteen.
Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited (ZEEL) Premium and FTA GEC business cluster head Aparna Bhosle said, “I will go with my gut feeling. I have lived in this country and I have seen this kind of content and I believe it’s going to work. You will not know unless you try it out. So, it’s a gut call.” “At the launch, we are starting with 11 shows, and around October, we are planning to launch another 16 new shows.”
Speaking about the target audience, she mentioned that Zee Cafe’s high viewership comes from mega metros. “The 7-9pm prime time is working for the channel,” she added.
“For a brand, the starting point is: what do you want to stand for. We launched the channel with the tagline ‘All Eyes On New’. Viewers of this genre are seeking more content. If we look at English GEC, it is largely American content. It’s a great fit for the brand, and we think that consumer will love it,” ZEEL domestic broadcast business CEO Punit Misra said.
Zee Cafe’s marketing campaign will be largely run on digital platforms and the network’s channels. “The campaign will be focussed on big towns as the main viewership comes from those markets, according to measurement system. As English content viewing in India is rising day by day, 20-40 age-group in large towns, we think, will consume this kind of content,” Misra added.
“We are delighted that Zee Café is bringing BBC First to India, which will bring the best of British creativity to an appreciative audience. This is a curation of critically acclaimed and award-winning original British drama, that will challenge perceptions though surprising storylines and unforgettable characters,” commented BBC Worldwide director – global brands and content marketing Julia Kenyon. “BBC First has been successful in countries where it has already launched, across Australia, the Middle East, Europe and Asia. We look forward to connecting with the Indian audience who know and enjoy premium drama,” she added.
From compelling narratives to awe-inspiring characters, viewers will get to explore a rich & diverse variety of content. Not just that, they will also get to see versatile actors such as Rowan Atkinson popularly known as Mr. Bean, Dominic Cooper, Sam Riley, Kate Bosworth, Lily James and many more in the BBC First block.
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.
