English Entertainment
ZMZ on the offensive, acquires 240 films in 3 months
MUMBAI: Zee Movie Zone (ZMZ), thus far a distant third in English movie channel space to fierce rivals HBO and Star Movies, may just be about to give the competition a run for its money. During the period October- December 2004, the channel has quietly gone and bought itself the rights to a whopping 240 films.
In the process, ZMZ looks ready to provide answers to the questions raised in the industry after Zee’s English movie channel lost the MGM tagline in its title post the buyout of MGM Studios by Sony Pictures International.
Channel officials claim that out of these; 40 films are high profile premiers while the rest are either smaller titles or repeats. ZMZ business head Ajay Trigunayat is confident that such a strong portfolio of properties will help the channel to translate an increased market share in this segment. Speaking to Indiantelevision.com he said, “We have negotiated deals with Miramax, Paramount and Sony, among other studios. We have The Aviator with us. The Martin Scorcese film will be released theatrically across the country on 19 February and we will air it towards the end of the year.
The Aviator is one of the hot favourites to take top honours at this year’s Oscars, to be held later this month. Trigunayat is pegging his hopes on the movie which deals with a reclusive billionaire named Howard Hughes. ZMZ also has the rights to Kill Bill Volume 2. In March the channel will air the Ben Affleck thriller Reindeer Games. Trigunayat also informed that ZMZ has retained the rights to some films it has already aired. “The Silence Of The Lambs for instance is a classic. The repeat value is very high for this film.”
However, as the channel starts implementing its new properties, a more pressing issue that it is groping with is its distribution netwok. As of now the channel has not been able to acquire a prime band position. To counter this it has plans to spend the next two to three months in strengthening its distribution network. The channel, in association with Zee Turner, has initiated hectic negotiations with cable operators across the country to position itself on the prime band.
Trigunayat said,”Our efforts in the next couple of months will focus on increasing our reach. While research indicates that people do watch us there are some networks which do not carry us.”
“Even if they do carry us we are not on the right band. So technically, while we are available in 18 million homes, there are issues we are trying to sort out with cable operators across the country,” he opined.
Trigunayat added that work needed to be done on the technical front too. In many areas the channel’s reception is not clear. As regards marketing initiatives, Trigunayat said that they would kick-off once the distribution hassles had been sorted out
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.
