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Hindi Film and Television: Top Trends of 2010

December 29, 2010 By 1 Comment

Hindi Television Trends of 2010

Yash Raj and Sony tried, and failed, to bring in the future of Hindi television

For me, this was one of the most significant media events of the year. Over the last 5 years I have listened to thousands of people complain about Hindi television, and ask why shows similar to the better western content can’t be made in India. Finally someone tried to do just this, and, despite a huge marketing campaign, it didn’t work.

Maybe the marketing didn’t connect with viewers? Maybe the programming (keeping the timeslots to late nights or weekends) failed, and the shows should have gone head to head with the GEC primetime offerings? Maybe anyone who is interested in high production values and good scripts is already watching English channels. Maybe these shows were just way ahead of their time, and this is exactly what people will be watching 5 years from now?

For now at least, we are stuck with family serials and dancing reality TV

Music videos to promote TV shows

StarPlus and Colours created music videos to promote their shows Masterchef, and Bigg Boss. While such videos can be played on TV, they are most useful as a viral internet marketing tool. Nice to see TV channels looking at new ways to promote their content.

Reality shows kept branching out

StarPlus had Masterchef and Mahayatra – a religious travel show.

Imagine had Desi Girl, Rahul Dulhaniya Le Jayega, Raaz Pichhle Janam Ka.

Bindass had Emotional Atyachar

Sadly, the endless dance and singing shows still seem to rule, with compulsory celebrity hosts, no matter how pointless their presence.

StarPlus took back the number one GEC slot from Colors.

The competitive lead from Colors’ ‘disruptive programming’ approach faded away as the other channels raced to dump their K serials and launch stories set in regional districts or with unusual protagonists.

Bad luck for Colors, but great news for India. Hindi television is in a far better place today than it was two years ago. The old formula for hit TV is gone, and story and character are more important than ever.

Multi-lingual viewers are starting to transition from the Hindi GECs to regional content

Channels in regional languages are blossoming, especially Bhojpuri, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, and the four southern languages. The quality of content is improving, which is drawing more advertising money. Ernst and Young estimates that ad spends on regional channels will grow by 25% this year, compared to 16% on Hindi channels.

Broadcasters are taking the view that if they are going to bleed viewers and revenue from their flagship channel, they might as well bleed into other channels that they own. Almost all the big Hindi TV players have either already started launching regional channels or have announced that they will be doing so in the near future.

More regional channels mean more competition to develop great content. This will accelerate the slippage of viewers and ad revenue further.

One potential upside of this that I can see is that as more melodramatic, emotional content shifts to regional channels, the Hindi GECs will start exploring newer formats and narratives.

As a side note – another reason that channels like regional offerings is that the content is cheap. Hindi drama costs 7-10 lakh per episode (on average) compared to 2 Lakh an episode more regional dramas. Reality shows are also cheaper as the local stars charge far less to host the content.

Prime time expanded

From channel to channel, primetime can now cover anything between 6:30pm and 11:30pm.

What does this mean? More people are watching TV, over a wider spread of time. Primetime is all original programming, not repeats, so more primetime means a wider range of content for viewers to choose from.

First web based show – Bol Niti Bol from Balaji

Balaji showed just how flexible its business model is by backflipping from a range of virtually identical K serials, to a variety of significantly different shows. On top of that they have released a couple of great films (including the awesome LSD), started an online community to search for talent, and have launched a film and acting school.

To top it off, in July they released India’s first web based serial. Bol Niti Bol, the life journal of an 18 year old girl making her way through life.

Bol Niti Bol was actually designed as a multi-site web experience. Videos are hosted on YouTube and news/lifestyle sites, plus a Facebook page and a twitter feed. Balaji claims that the 17 episodes received more than 650,000 views in the first month, and they had 10,000 followers across the social media sites.

Why is this important? When families earn more money in developed countries, they buy more TVs. In the US, more than 50% of households have 3 or more televisions. Everyone in the household gets to watch whatever they want, so there is space for a huge variety of channels and content.

In contrast, most Indian families don’t own a TV. Often TVs are shared between families, or within a large extended family. As Indian families become richer, they rarely buy more TVs. This is why the target audience for popular TV channels is SEC BCD women, even though we keep hearing about India’s enormous ‘youth’ population.

Indian families buy computers (for their children’s education), and fancy mobile phones. As the older family members usually control the TV set, there is a huge opportunity to deliver targeted content to the younger family members over the internet.

With 3G just around the corner, and smart phones with big colour screens selling for under Rs.5000, we will shortly see a deluge of short-form web-based content aimed at the 15-25yr old market.

Hindi Film Trends of 2010

For Serious Films, Story Ruled.

Big budget serious films that lacked story, or lacked Indian context struggled at the boxoffice, often flopping. Kites, Ravaan, Veer, Teen Patti, Aisha and Guzaarish for example. Despite beautiful production values, each of these were either poorly written or lacked a connection with Indian life and values.

Big budget serious films with good stories or strong Indian context did well (as long as they were properly marketed). Rajneeti, My Name is Khan, Once Upon A Time In Mumbai.

Khelein Hum Jee Jaan Se was possibly the worst marketed film of the year. Someone stuck up a few posters, and the next day it was in cinemas. Although, since Lamhaa and Red Alert also struggled at the box office, despite strong marketing, maybe people just don’t like films about conflict zones this year?

Big-budget, madcap, plotless comedies continued to make as much money as ever. There were some unexplainable flops, but overall this category did well despite atrocious reviews with films such as Golmaal 3, Housefull, and Tees Maar Khan.

Small-Town Stories

Mirroring the trend in TV, stories set in smaller towns were generally successful. Dabaang, Tees Maar Khan, Peepli [Live], Udaan, Aakrosh, Ishqiya, Phas Gaye Re Obama, even featuring small-town attitudes or innocence (Atithi Tum Kab Jaoge, Tere Bin Laden)helped.

Other than in the big-budget comedies, there seemed to be far fewer international locations than in previous years. Possibly this is a hangover from the cash crunch that saw lots of producers slashing their film budgets.

‘Multiplex’ Films

The young, ‘non hero’, multiplex-driven genre continued to grow, generally through the efforts of Ranbir, Imran and Farhaan. I Hate Luv Storys, Karthik Calling Karthik, Anaaja Anjaani, Break Ke Baad.

Lots of 3D films

Indian multiplexes (at least in major cities) have rushed to upgrade their projection technology. Many Hollywood films, which in the US are shown in both 2 and 3D, in India were shown only in 3D

Lots of ‘New’

Lots of debuts. By some estimates there were over 150 new entrants to the industry in either significant acting roles or as writers or directors.

There were some great attempts at doing something different content-wise:

  • First film with gay protagonists – Dunno Y… Na Jaane Kyon
  • First TV show adaptation – Khichdi – The Movie
  • And my favourite risk-taking film of 2010 – Love, Sex and Dhoka
Filed Under: Film, Marketing, Online, Television Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The First Big-Name Transmedia Company?

December 27, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This was a very exciting piece of news that i picked up from the NY Times.

“Guillermo del Toro Opening a Boutique ‘Transmedia’ Studio

Transmedia storytelling, according to Wikipedia is “a technique of telling stories across multiple platforms and formats”. From a media and content perspective this can include film, television, online, print, radio etc.

Examples include:

  • the TV series Heroes. It is based on television, but on top of that is a bunch of other stuff such as comics, website and books that cover the same characters and are set in the same universe. Same again for Lost.
  • Almost anything Disney has done lately
  • Isa TKM. This Venezuelan TV serial is about a schoolgirl in love with a musician. the show launched with websites, Facebook and MySpace pages, phone ringtones and downloads, and a music album,

The magic of great transmedia is that a casual fan can enjoy the basic offering (such as the TV show) while a more passionate fan can ‘drill-down’ into the universe and satisfy their desire for more detail.

In the past, these sort of expansions happened organically. A show was successful, so producers started looking for spin-off options. A more modern view, is to plan for these expansions right from the start.

This is the role of Transmedia agencies. They are not necessarily experts at any one media channel, but rather try to coordinate between the different channels, knowing what bits of the story will work best on different platforms.

Personally, I love this stuff and have been reading about it for a while. I don’t write about it much, primarily because it is still a heavily ‘academic’ subject which means that the people who do write about it sound much smarter than me :-)

The reason the article caught my eye was the involvement of Guillermo del Toro the writer, producer, or director of many great films, including Pan’s Labyrinth, Blade 2, and Hellboy.  The company he has partnered in, Mirada, “will house all of the tools that filmmakers need to create entertainment that lives partly on the Web, partly in movie theaters, partly in video games under one roof.”

Awesome!

Filed Under: Film, Marketing, Television, Transmedia Tagged With: , , , , ,

Measuring Investment in Entertainment Properties

November 21, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This sounds really interesting, however I couldn’t find out much beyond a couple of pretty basic press releases.

The essence of this is that the cost of sponsoring big-ticket TV shows is going through the roof, so someone has to figure out whether this money is really worth spending. As an example, the ‘Presenting Sponsorship” rights for Bigg Boss went to Vodafone for Rs.20 Cr.($4.4 mil)

Synovate India and Domor Communications (who previously worked on the CRIC metrics for IPL 3) have developed a research program with the catchy but weird title: Consumer Response to Investment in Entertainment Properties (CRIEP). This will hopefully allow marketing managers to cover their asses, and allow the channels to charge even more.

Since it will be a pretty big kick in the teeth for a lot of people if the report shows the money is wasted, I’m curious about how unbiased this is really going to be. It could so easily turn into a big lovefest. Sort of like FICCI Frames which every year announces that this is the year for the film industry to grow by 18%.

They claim they will be surveying around 6000 people across 9 cities, using pre and post measurement. To launch the product, they are tracking the current seasons of two shows: Bigg Boss 4 and KBC 4.

The research tries to answer questions such as:

  • How is my brand competing for consumer mind space against all other brands on the same property, across categories?
  • What were the most recalled elements of the show and what brands were they associated with?
  • Is there a difference in the impact of the two Entertainment Properties?
  • Does the impact vary by geographies/ age/ SEC?
  • Does the noticeability of my campaign impact the effect of the properties on the brand metrics?
  • What price does my competitor pay for staying away from these properties?
  • How does it impact my channel’s imagery / loyalty – providing valuable inputs for the channels marketing Big Boss Season 4 and KBC Season 4.

Wonder how much they are selling all the goodies for?

When did ‘TV shows’ become ‘entertainment properties’?

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The 2 Type of Criticism of Indian Reality TV Shows

November 17, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The criticism of Indian reality TV shows that gets stirred up from time to time comes in two flavours:

Vulgar / Obscene content.

Generally this is politicians trying to attract the family values vote, or media outlets trying to drum up controversy by interviewing completely random people.

Here is an example from Congress leader Sanjay Nirupam in TOI:

"The kind of reality TV content that is going on air presently in shows like Rakhi Ka Insaaf, Emotional Attyachar or Bigg Boss 4 is extremely vulgar and below standard. These television channels can go to any extent in the race for TRPs.

I did however stumble across one quote that provides the answer within its complaint. Chandan Dixit, a senior bank executive says:

Today if I watch Bigg Boss with my family and kids, it surely seems vulgar. But if I watch it alone I enjoy it".

In India, the assumption is that all TV content should be suitable for all ages. The privatisation and rapid growth of the TV industry, from a handful of government channels, to 500 channels today, has outpaced regulatory frameworks. There is no rating system for TV. As a result, shows which are trying to deal with more adult content are doing it within the framework of an ‘all ages’ rating, and are therefore called ‘obscene’.

The simple solution is to introduce a range of ratings and broadcast guidelines. Content shown during certain hours – late at night for example – can state upfront that it is intended for adult audiences. When Big Brother screens in Australia, there are primetime shows that are family-friendly, and late night Big Brother Uncut shows that can show more risqué content.

Beyond reality TV, this would also allow for scripted dramas to have the option of being  more ‘adult’ in terms of language, violence, or sex.

Giving TV channels the opportunity to self-regulate, as long as they are honest with their viewers about what will be screened, is always preferable to forcing government censorship down people’s throats.

Can producers and anchors can be held responsible for the actions of contestants, or even viewers?

After a reality show participant committed suicide following humiliation from the anchor (Rakhi Sawant), there have been calls for Rakhi’s arrest for abetting the suicide.

Again, this is mostly just political grandstanding. Humiliating someone publicly, especially when they elected to be part of a pretty absurd show, certainly doesn’t make you legally responsible for their actions. Whether Rakhi feels at all responsible is up to her own moral code, and will be illustrated by how she treats future participants on the show.

The bigger question is whether the show’s producers have a responsibility to consider the psychological impact of the show on the participants. I have written about this in more detail here:

http://www.chrismhiggins.com/2010/11/indian-reality-tv-who-is-responsible.html

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Indian Reality TV: Who is Responsible for the Contestants?

November 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

The comedian Dane Cook does a great segment on the public service “Don’t Say Gay” TV ads that ran in the US. In the ad, two girls are shopping for clothes. One asks the other “do you like this top?”. The other girl responds, “no, its totally gay”. Out steps Hillary Duff, who tells the girls that its not ok to say Gay, when you mean Bad.

On stage, Dane Cook explodes, “well thank you!….. Hillary F*&%ing Duff. The next time I am facing one of life’s conundrums, I will stop and ask, what would Hillary Duff say now?”

I feel much the same way about Rakhi Ka Insaaf, the reality show on Imagine TV. It is something like Aap Ki Kachehri, but hosted by Rakhi Sawant. People seeking justice for problems in their lives can come on the show to have their dirty laundry aired in public, and hopefully cleaned, by Rakhi.

When has anyone, ever, in their lives, when faced with a problem, wondered, ”What advice would Rakhi Sawant give me now?”

 

Obviously people do want her advice (or are desperate to be on TV), as the show is currently running, Rakhi describes her role as:

Even though no one takes me seriously regarding my passion for social work, but through this show, people will get a chance to know me. I will only support the truth, be it a girl or boy, I will make sure my judgments are unbiased. Whatever decisions will be made, will be ‘dil se’”

Phew!

On a particular episode, Laxman and Anita sought Rakhi’s advice regarding their marital discord. Rakhi humiliated the husband (calling him impotent) and his family. According to the man’s family, this caused him to sink into depression, he stopped eating, and died.

Many reality shows are designed to push contestants to the brink, way past their comfort zone. Should reality shows be held responsible for the consequences?

Based on limited online research, I’ve found references to around 10-15 suicides, lots of attempted suicides, and 1 murder, all committed by reality show ex-contestants, shortly after filming. Generally this behaviour spells the end of the show. As advertisers disappear, the network chooses not to renew the show.

Internationally, it has now become common for the producers to provide not only psychiatric screening in the selection phases, but also intensive counselling after the camera stops rolling. Counsellors spend time (often 2 – 6 months) with the contestant and their family to help them resolve the feelings that have arisen, as well as the added tension of being thrust into and then yanked-from such a public position, possible with rejection and humiliation.

Based on India’s massive shortage of trained counsellors, and the great difficulty a common man would face in seeking compensation from a TV channel/producer, I have my doubts that Indian TV producers are providing this sort of care to their participants.

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Music Videos to Promote New TV Shows

November 14, 2010 By 1 Comment

I know this all happened a month back, but I have been busy moving house, so there have been a couple of posts stuck in my drafts folder, screaming to be unleashed Smile.

Two big, new, celebrity-driven TV shows – Masterchef India, and Bigg Boss (Indian Big Brother) – each created music videos as part of their promotional efforts. These videos built lots of buzz, were linked to all over the net, and ran on multiple TV channels.

I’m really curious about whether these types of shows actually need the big celebrity talent behind them. There is a common understanding in India that promoting anything is difficult unless celebrity names are attached. Book publishers often won’t organise launch events for their authors, unless the author can rope in a few Bollywood celebrities, regardless of whether they have anything to do with the book. All these TV shows worked internationally because of the interesting premise, setup, execution, and the naturally unfolding narrative and characterisation that hooked viewers. Anyway, I digress.

The videos are very different.

The  Masterchef one is instrumental, with a big kitchen filled with frantic cooks and Akshay zooming around as a conductor of sorts. The music is primarily rhythm based, drawing on the sounds of a kitchen such as pots banging and knives chopping. It is a very fresh treatment.

The Bigg Boss video plays like a very standard Bollywood ‘nightclub’ video. Cheesy rap and singing, nonsense lyrics, background dancers, and Salman Khan looking ‘cool’ in a thousand costume changes.

I tried to figure out viewing stats, but they are both running on so many websites that the numbers would never have been accurate. Anyway, here they are:

Masterchef India Music Video

 

Bigg Boss Music Video
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Media Marketing Bits & Pieces

October 29, 2010 By Leave a Comment

A couple of neat TV marketing concepts that caught my eye lately:

Disney, promoting their show “Art Attack” ran a campaign entitled “Paint Your World”. Children across India painted globes for submission. 16,000 were selected and assembled into a giant Disney logo at a Mumbai Mall. There were also activities for school groups to promote art.

UTV World Movies TV channel announced that it will begin a series of associations with art related events. Kicking this off was sponsorship of The Art Conspiracy, a two-day festival of art, music and performance, running across 8 venues in Bandra, Mumbai. Its great to see niche TV channels supporting smaller, independent events. The channel has also sponsored live comedy in the past.

Masterchef India recently began on the Star Plus channel. The premiere of the show was held online, on the channel and masterchef websites, as well as through embedded widgets on a host of partner sites, including a major web portal. They ran an interactive promotion throughout the online premiere, giving away blackberry phones. Interesting way to connect with a younger, net-savvy audience.

MTV has launched a new website – MTVPlay.in. The site presents a range of research to help people understand “Generation Me” as they have termed their viewers. The insights are harvested from the channel’s own networks of college students, as well as research agencies

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Television Industries of Emerging Markets – A Snapshot

October 13, 2010 By Leave a Comment

This is a quick glance at some of the data comparing the television industries in India, China, Brazil, Russia, and Indonesia. The most obvious observation is the effect of fragmentation: India has more companies competing, which drives down ad revenues. Couple this with the lower penetration of TV across the country and you can see why the profit margins are so much weaker in India. Some data is missing from the table.

Number of companies dominating TV ad sales market
Household TV Penetration
Average revenue per user
China
 3 TV companies hold 50% share >94%
Brazil
 4 TV companies hold 80% share >94% $50
Russia
 6 Broadcasters and 3 media owners hold 80% share >94% $5
Indonesia
 3 TV companies hold 70% share 55%
India
 3 TV companies hold 40% share 60% $4.

TV sector – Revenue from all sources 2010
TV sector – Revenue from all sources 2014 (predicted)
TV Network Profit Margins (Average)
China
 $11.2bn $19.6bn 30%
Brazil
 $59.3bn $101.9bn 30%
Russia
 30%
Indonesia
 30%
India
 $5.3bn $9.6bn 13%

Ref: Warc

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Indian TV Dramas – A Sense of Place?

August 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

One of the biggest differences that I often notice between Indian and US/UK/Australian TV drama series, is the lack of ‘place’ in terms of shooting locations.

Watch a few series of The Wire, and you really get a feeling for what the city of Baltimore is like. SATC, Law and Order etc are very firmly New York shows. Even the shows that are mostly filmed on LA sound stages, such as Boston Legal, Friends, CSI or Seinfeld use many outdoor establishing shots and some location shoots to firmly place the characters in a particular city. In spin off series, such as NCIS:Los Angeles or CSI: Miami, the city itself is generally a key character, through location selection, in order to differentiate the new series from the original.

In Indian serials, this is very rarely the case. There are very few shows that can be visually identified as being from a particular place. Obviously each series is located ‘somewhere’, but this is often established though dialogue or the characters’ dress or speech dialects. In the recent trend towards using rural settings, most of the ‘villages’ where the families live are fictional. There is a sense of place in terms of a part of the country, but rarely a specific city.

One show that doesn’t fit this trend is 12/24 Karol Bagh, which portrays life in a section of Delhi, even using the address as its title.

It would be interesting to see more shows pick a location and try to make it part of the story. The easy excuse as to why this doesn’t happen is that outdoor shoots are expensive and time consuming, and the pressure to produce daily episodes on tight money/time budgets makes outdoor locations in real cities difficult.

Many of the locations used in the TV serials are all within Mumbai Film City, just repainted and with new signs in the script of other states. Hiring bus loads of extras who will mostly do as they are told is a thousand times easier that trying to manages the crowds that turn up if you put a camera and actors in the middle of a Indian city.

Still, using Boston Legal as an example, they used outdoor establishing shots in between almost every scene. These not only set the location – was the scene in the office, in a bar, in a residential area – but also the time of day or night. It made the series feel very integrated in the city, with hardly any actual location shoots.

No reason that wouldn’t work for Indian serials?

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Tv Serial Mash-ups

June 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

For anyone unfamiliar with the term, a ‘mash-up’ is a new piece of content created entirely from existing content, combined in a new way. Take the visuals from a film and replace the sound with dialogue from another film – voila, a mash up.

ABC, an American tv channel, is doing a series of webisodes in which characters from multiple shows interact together. If its successful, the episodes could make it back to tv.

How cool is that!!

Haven’t you ever wondered, what would happen if this character from one show was to hang out with that character from another show?

What is Buffy was to wander into True Blood?

What if Kashi was to come up against Ammaji?

The possibilities are endless.. Additionally, the costs of a webisode can be small enough, and there is a strong enough audience pull, that you can often completely cover the cost in advance through brand integration or ad sales.

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