English Entertainment
ZEEL’s &Privé HD channel to target upscale non-conformists in six metros
MUMBAI: There’s a thin sliver amongst the hundreds of millions of cinema lovers in India that gorge on international independent and award winning films. Leading indian TV network Zee Entertainment Enterprise Ltd (ZEEL) is about to offer them something that is going to keep them glued to their TV sets when &Privé HD launches come 24 September 2017.
“The breeze of change is seen as everyone is focusing on connoisseur, hedonist and explorers, but we are targeting the non-conformist,” says ZEEL English cluster head Aparna Bhosle.
&Privé HD’s tagline is ‘Feel the Other Side’ which distinguishes it from others in the English movie channel genre.
With films from 28 independent Hollywood players and studios such as Paramount and PVR, &Privé HD library boasts of 350 exclusive titles.
&Privé HD, designed and packaged by Zink, a Canadian digital agency, will telecast over 40 premieres in six months after the launch. Moonlight will be the first premier on the launch day, airing on two time-slots — 1 and 9pm. Other premieres and movies on &Privé HD include: Lion, Pele, Jackie, Arrival and Free State of Jones.
“The English movies TV channel market (in India) is worth Rs 4.5–Rs 6 billion; English content viewership (on HD channels) is on the rise,” points out Bhosle.
&Privé HD is targeting the six metros and will be available on Dish TV, Tata Sky, Airtel Digital TV, and Sun TV. Zeel was in talks with Videocon d2h for distribution at the time of writing.
“In 2015, India had five million HD STBs, which saw a 160 per cent increase over the past three years. Today, we have around 10.8 million HD STBs,” Bhosle revealed.
The marketing and promotional campaign of &Privé HD has been drawn up by FCB Ulka. Zeel’s team has conjured an innovative out-of-the-box promotional plans for the niche channel, apart from pushing the launch TVC on all sister-HD channels. Digital, print and OOH media are slated to start rolling out the messaging for &Privé HD.
“Our digital platform has a reach of 14 million which will help us to increase our viewership. Our outdoor campaign will hit Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bengaluru on 18 September and multiplex promotions will start two days before the launch,” Bhosle adds.
Attempts have been made to crack the niche genres in the past with efforts by the likes of NDTV with NDTV Lumiere, which lasted a couple of years, but was pulled off, despite critical appreciation, on account of a lack of a profitable business model. And since then others have entered like HBO Hits, Sony Le Plex and Star Movies Select HD.
A media professional states that times are different now and discerning viewers – around two million of them in India – are willing to pay to watch exclusive differentiated content in HD as evident from the traction Amazon Prime and Netflix have got in recent times. “Hence, it’s quite likely that if Zee sticks by &Privé HD and gives it time, it could end up finding a profitable niche for itself in, let’s say, the next three years,” she says.
That’s how Indian movie lovers are hoping &Privé’s script will play out.
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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.
