TV.NXT 2011: Will TV still be fun in 2020?

The post-lunch session on Day Two of TV.NXT was a discussion that appealed to the intellect, as well as the funny bone of the delegates. Titled 'The Future of Television' and moderated by the ever-jovial chief executive officer of Star CJ Home Shopping Paritosh Joshi, the session compelled the audience to consider what the future of television will hold for broadcasters and viewers.

The panel comprised Ashok Venkatramani, chief executive officer, MCCS India, Sunil Lulla, managing director and chief executive officer, Times Television Network, Tarun Katial, chief executive officer, Reliance Broadcast Network, Devendra Parulekar, partner, TCE (technology, communications and entertainment), Ernst & Young, and Raman Kalra, director and partner, communications sector and head, media and entertainment, IBM Global Business Services, India/South Asia.

TV is timeless: Flintstones to Jetsons

Grabbing everyone's attention right at the outset, Joshi spoke about how the TV set is something that is depicted in two cartoon shows -- The Flintstones and The Jetsons. These two shows are set in two contrasting eras; the former is set in the Stone Age, while the latter is set in a time far, far into the future. The point he tried to make was that in both these cartoon shows, the TV set is common, making one reflect on the topic of discussion with renewed interest. This kind of depiction of the TV, he said, reminds us that the TV is something that is "ubiquitous, timeless and omnipresent".

To this, Parulekar responded, "Television has been on our minds for years, and will continue to be. What will, however, change, is the manner in which content is consumed."

According to him, questions that will arise include: On what kind of device will TV content be consumed? Will it be personal consumption or will it be family consumption? Will it be received through cable, DTH, or a wireless service? Will people be able to talk back to, and give feedback to the content generator, the broadcaster or the distributer? Will people be able to shop, buy or make payments from that same device while they are watching? So, his belief is that TV's fundamental purpose to inform, entertain and educate will remain, but the manner in which the content is consumed will undergo change.

Evolution of the viewer-broadcaster relationship

Taking a cue from Parulekar's response, Joshi then posed a question about the evolution of an important cog in the whole TV viewing process - the viewer. "In the past 10 years, have you noticed a change in the relationship between the viewer and broadcaster? And, where do you visualise this viewer in 2020, vis-a-vis the broadcaster?" Joshi questioned.

Katial of Reliance Broadcast Network took the baton and answered, "Today, there is no large/mass consumption of TV on part of the viewer; rather, today people are watching things for themselves and by themselves (as opposed to TV being a family viewing experience)."

Joshi then spoke about how, a few years back, the viewer became solus instead of being part of a big community.

Katial went on, "Also, today there is an attention deficit on part of viewers - which means long-form TV (hour-long TV shows) as it existed earlier is finding it difficult to survive in today's day and age (a point that invoked Joshi's comment, "So is KBC counter-intuitive?' and sought Katial's response, "No, KBC is counter-programming, which is why it works despite being so long!"). In fact, even half-hour long programmes find it difficult to get the same viewer coming from the first segment to the last segment, as per viewer diagnostics."

Technology, citizen journalism and the changing nature of news

Katial went on to state how technology is leading the way ahead today. "A lot of content creation for the viewer will get defined by the technology that the viewer uses on the last mile," he said, "and that will change the way we view TV content."

Joshi then moved on to how citizen journalism seen during the Mumbai deluge six years back changed the relationship between broadcasters and viewers. "Where will this relationship head in the future?" he asked.

Venkatramani of MCCS opined that the citizen journalism witnessed on July 26, 2005, was purely circumstantial and that it hasn't really taken off as much as it ought to have since then.

With the advancement of technology, the news industry stands to be far more affected than the entertainment industry, in his opinion. "The time gap between gathering news and delivering it to the viewer is going to undergo a big crunch and this change will be driven by technology," he explained.

The role of the newsroom and the time news channels get to process, analyse, package and present the news is going to crunch really fast, Venkatramani elaborated. The cost of news gathering will come down, he added - also a change that will be aided by technology. Consequently, TV companies and TV channels will give way to content companies that will dissipate the content, agnostic of the platform.

Joshi then brought up the issue of how today, there's less news and more commentary (boldly mentioning Times Now news anchor Arnab Goswami in this context!) owing to the narrowing time gap between the occurrence of an event and the dissemination of that information on some platform or the other. "Are TV news channels all about curated news nowadays and is that what 2020 is going to be all about?" he asked.

Lulla of Times Television Network opined that we first need to comprehend the social impact of television and understand where India is headed. "About 40 per cent of the consumers in India don't have a TV set," he reminded, highlighting the importance of prompting the consumer before doing anything else. This figure, he feels, has to become a single digit number nine years from today. In fact, a recent statistic shows that this is an actual possibility because between 2006 and 2011, the proportion of non-TV to TV homes in India flipped from 53:47 to 47:53, showing that we're on the right track!

According to Lulla, for a broadcasting company to be successful in 2020, it has to be a really good "monitising machine". Catering to this potential change is the real challenge, according to him.

This is when Joshi questioned whether TV has directly influenced social and economic progress, created social and economic value and whether it will continue to do so a decade from now.

To this, Kalra of IBM Global Business Services responded by saying that as a medium, TV is driving socio-economic growth in some parts of society and this is bound to continue. "What is important," he insisted, "is that this gets done in a controlled manner in the days ahead," before adding that the new generation of youngsters will drive media consumption in the future.

Broadcasting to Unicasting

Then, Joshi brought up the issue of whether trends such as broad-sourcing and crowd-sourcing, and the presence of virtual (online) broadcasters with far more radical and democratic methods and content are endangering today's traditional broadcasters.

Parulekar of Ernst & Young added that technological advancement today provides the required tools for UGC - it is easier to shoot a home video on a good camera and upload it on YouTube via an internet broadband connection at home today than it was a decade back. It is thus these tools that have democratised content generation today, he said.

Addressing the prime issue of the future of TV, Parulekar spoke about how TV content will change such that there will be more and more niche and highly specialised content targeted at select audiences, as opposed to a large audience comprising millions of viewers.

"This is because today, we have the capability of not just broadcasting but multi-casting. In 2020, we will have the capability of 'unicasting' -- that is, targeting the content to a particular individual!" The ability to pay in real time has to exist in the form of micro-transactions, to support this.

This also led to the question of whether the media intensity in India (that currently stands at 0.2 per cent of the GDP) will increase to at least 0.5 per cent in 2020. The market, the panel agreed, is ready for such a change. Will it be fun to be a part of the TV industry in 2020, though? Well, it could swing either way for broadcasters - but it certainly does seem fun from a viewer's perspective.

(TV.NXT is organised by afaqs!, in association with STAR News (presenting sponsor). The other sponsors include Zee 24 Ghante Chhattisgarh, Amagi, HeadHonchos, ApnaCircle.com, Fox History & Traveller, and Lukup. TV.NXT was held at JW Marriot, Mumbai, on September 29-30, 2011.)