English Entertainment
Zee MGM to reinvent itself with more contemporary fare
MUMBAI: Star Movies and HBO could finally see some serious competition from the lion. Zee MGM is in the midst of a revamp in order to appeal to a younger audience.
The channel will switch from old films to new films which have been released after 1998. Earlier the channel appealed to people who liked older films like westerns. Zee MGM’s business head Abhijit Saxena said that with the new line up he was confident that the channel would be taken more seriously by the competition.
As was the case with Zee English, Zee MGM too will see its action quotient. Speaking on this Zee MGM’s programming head Lena Joshi said that the channel would be young, fast paced and with a lot of known stars. Therefore the channel will focus a lot less on the older titles that it is known for.
Each month it will release around seven titles out of which one would be major. This film would air in the middle of the month from June. It will air Waking Up In Reno with Patrick Swayze and Oscar winner Charlize Theron. Earlier it used to air at the end of the month. One of the major titles that Zee MGM has is Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volumes one and two. The first volume will air sometime in August. Then there’s The Hours on 30 May, which gave Nicole Kidman an Oscar. Kidman plays author Virginia Woolf who battles depression while writing Mrs Dalloway. That book will later on affect the life of a housewife played by Julianne Moore. Meryl Streep is in the third segment, which is a modern day version of Mrs Dalloway. Suicide, thoughts of death, repressed sexuality all make for portent cinema.
Joshi said that the channels fare looking ahead would be a mixed bag of Oscar winners and action films with known stars. Another movie lined up is Frida with Oscar nominee Salma Hayek. There is a lot of buzz around these titles. “As far as MGM is concerned the channel will be acquiring a lot of Bond titles. The MGM titles would be divided in to classic and new
releases. The ratio of MGM films to the other studios will be 30:70. We are in the process of acquiring a lot of titles from Sony Pictures Entertainment.
“We are working out a big deal with them. However the films won’t be premieres as most of them have an output deal with HBO. Miramax and Paramount are the other studios that we have deals with.”
The acquisition cost for Zee MGM will go up by 80-90 per cent by the end of the year. The channel is also going in for a new look, which will happen over three to four months. There will be more festivals. Family Festival is happening this month and next month there’s the Mobster festival with movies like Gangs of New York.
Then you will films around a genre like war or films dealing with America or films with the same star. “We will have a slot for the older titles like Old is Gold. We will show classics. For a western festival you will have The Good The Bad And the Ugly. Films like this will never go out of fashion.” Saxena added that there were around 50 advertisers for both the
channels.
As far as dubbing is concerned the channel is looking into the possibility of dubbing some of the action titles. As far as the uncensored titles in the night were concerned Joshi said that the activity had stopped after the broadcaster received a letter from the I&B Ministry. She conceeded that each day requests would be coming in on email. English channels see growth post 10:30 pm as earlier people watch soaps.
Joshi added that the reason for the lull in promotional activity on Zee English and Zee MGM was due to the internal managerial shifts that had been taking place. Now though there will be more activity. Zee MGM will take the theatrical route to showcase its wares. In fact Zee TV’s ad for The Big Break can already be seen. The multiplexes like Fun Republic
will be used extensively.
Online, the channel is looking to get more interactive with contests. Previously these were done with contests2win.com and Indiatimes.com. For SMS based contests there is the network number.
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.
