Sony eyes top slot in India, plans new channels

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Sony Pictures Television, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc, recently bought 32% stake in its Indian television channels holding firm Multi Screen Media for $271 crore, or about 1,500 crore. The deal with minority shareholders, which helped Sony Pictures increase its stake in MSM to a little over 94%, reflects the company's bullishness on India, Andy Kaplan, president at Sony Pictures Television, tells ET in an interview. Excerpts:

After having almost bought out minority shareholders, does Sony Pictures plan any strategy change in its channel business in India?

MSM has been a very successful business for us and we wanted to own more of it while our partners were looking for an exit. The deal doesn't change our strategy at all; we have been running the business for many years, and we are going to continue to do that. Having said that, there is really a good growth potential in front of us and India is a market that we are very excited about.

Any specific plans to get Sony to the numero uno slot?

Being number one is always an important goal. The broadcasting space and the general entertainment space is very crowded and very competitive-the top two players sort of move interchangeably. But whether we are 1, 2, 3 or 4 in any particular week is less important than showing good revenue and ratings growth, which we have been doing. So we are going to continue to build our business and grow our ratings, and everything else should follow.

The number one is determined by ratings, but whether it's all day ratings, or digital ratings, or prime time ratings or whatever particular demographic you are looking at, there is always a lot of different ways to display the data. At the end of the day we strive to be the best group of channels, with the highest quality of programming and the most well-known and accepted brand. There is a lot of different ways to measure success including revenue and profitability. We weigh all those measures to determine how well we are doing and where we are going.

India has been one of the more successful TV markets for you. How does it compare with other regions?

For us, the India business is unique. Our MSM business, Sony Entertainment Television, SAB and MAX are all built on local language originally produced content and that's a different model than most of our other channels around the world, which are built more on American programming that is subtitled or dubbed into the local language. What it demonstrates is the power of local and original programming. There really isn't any other market where we have the same kind of broad reaching local language model.

What is the vision ahead for Sony?

I look at the MSM business as a consolidated business and while certainly SET is the mother ship and the corner stone, a lot of other businesses are important. Max has a lot of opportunity, SAB has been a tremendous success story and Pix is a significant competitor to other English movie services. Two years from now I hope that all of the existing businesses that we have are stronger than they are today and I anticipate that we will have a number of other businesses alongside of them that will add to the growth and expansion of the overall enterprise.

What are these other businesses that you plan to have?

I don't know yet, but there are a lot of opportunities that we are looking at. There is a lot up on the board and we are just evaluating every day to find the best use of our investment dollars and the best way to leverage our overall infrastructure.

What happens to SET when IPL's not there?

We have another five years to go-and in a perfect world, we would be able to continue with the IPL franchise for many, many years to go. But in the alternative, if that's not the case, hopefully all of the other channels and the programming and the infrastructure will be big enough and strong enough that the loss of the IPL from one of our channels won't be as significant five years from now as it might have been five years ago.

Source: Sony eyes top slot in India TV Business, plans new channels - The Economic Times
 
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