Getting into rural India

[Thakur]

‘Har Mushkil Ka
Hal Akbar Birbal’
a comedy on
Reliance
Broadcast
Network’s Big
Magic is a huge favourite in the Hindi
heartland of Bihar, Jharkhand and Uttar
Pradesh.
Zee Anmol’s reruns of Jhansi Ki Rani and
Choti Bahu do booming business on low-
end 2G mobile phones in small-town and
rural India.
So do reruns of Diya aur Baati Hum and
Saraswatichandra on Star Utsav, which is
available on DD’s Freedish, a free direct-
to-home or DTH service owned by
Doordarshan.
Free-to-air (FTA) channels showing
reruns of popular shows like Jhansi Ki
Rani and Choti Bahu are a rage in
entertainment starved rural and small-
town India. And advertisers love them
The boom in free-to-air channels in
small-town and rural India is one of the
biggest media stories playing out in the
R83,000-crore Indian media and
entertainment industry currently. Every
major broadcaster is launching FTAs. Zee
has got three of which two were launched
in the last one year alone. Star has one,
Viacom18, which owns Colors, launched
its FTA Rishtey last year.
Going by estimates there are over 300
FTAs in India. So far most were dodgy
news channels owned by politicians or
real-estate guys. Over the last two years
however, dozens of mainstream
broadcasters have jumped into this
market estimated at R1,300 crore in ad
revenues.
There are two things driving this boom:
One, is the spread of cable and DTH
which has been the fastest in rural India
in the last few years. To this add mobile
phones, which have become a popular
option for entertainment starved
audiences that have money but no options
in poorly connected parts of the country.
The biggest game changer has been DD’s
Freedish, a free DTH service. It reaches
an estimated 18 million homes making it
bigger than Tata-Sky and Dish TV. More
importantly, it is bringing TV to homes
that never had it. It is also becoming the
de-facto TV option in homes that had
nothing but Doordarshan. More than 30
channels such as Zee Anmol and Star
Utsav pay upwards of R3 crore a year to
be on DD’s Freedish.
Two, FTAs are also taking off is because
soon the audiences they reach will start
showing on rating numbers. The
Broadcast Audience Research Council
(BARC), an industry body will start
releasing numbers based on a new rating
system sometime next year. This sample,
claims BARC, will be double that of the
current one. More importantly, it will
include rural India for the first time.
These audiences are critical for growth in
several product categories from financial
services to soaps and detergents. And
advertisers desperate to reach them have
used radio, regional print and on-ground
events so far. Now TV, with its huge mass
impact, gets into the play. There is a
third, albeit more tangential reason,
digitisation.
More than half of India’s 160 million TV
homes are now digital. Till most of India
was analog, it was a one-size fits all
television market. Digitisation increases
the capacity of the service that brings TV
to your home. There is more slicing and
dicing of channels and packages.
Many existing TV homes realise that they
do not care to watch pay channels with
the fresh content, they are alright
watching reruns on FTAs. Many others
either do not have the willingness or the
capacity to pay. The market is then
segmenting between those who can pay
and those who cannot, between those who
just got a TV and those who have had one
for long.
As a result different offerings are being
made to different clusters within the 800-
odd million people who watch TV in
India. These are audiences at different
stages of growth and maturity. The many
markets that India is, are finally coming
into play in the TV business Getting into rural India - News