It’s not Telecom, it’s the great Indian Entertainment Revolution

It’s not Telecom, it’s the great Indian Entertainment Revolution

I have lived in this beautiful city of Vadodara for over a year and I know that nine nights of Navratri in Vadodara are quite magical. I promised to take my girls to the city during the festival this year.

So no sooner did the chance present itself, I found myself driving on the highway towards Vadodara on NH-48. We started the journey road at 5am on Saturday from our residence in Navi Mumbai to be able to beat the traffic within Mumbai. The plan was to reach Surat by 9.30 odd and Vadodara in time for Lunch. The girls were still somnolent, tired from the restless previous night. I have a pair of 8 year old twins and a 14yr old teenager – all girls and they had been excitedly packing stuff for the trip late until midnight.

The 'Revolutionaries'

I exited the city and hit the highway well before sunrise. My teenager kept me company, chatting up with me at times and playing choicest of music from her phone– both her choice & mine (mostly mine… since I skipped the songs using steering controls when I didn’t like what was playing). All this while the twins slept peacefully.

The twins got up as it suited them by about 7 am and after chatty conversations… they picked up my phone. They realized that they had little choice over the music with me and their elder sister around so this seemed like a cozy compromise.

Very soon, I realized that they were not playing games as they usually did - they were actually watching a movie. They were watching ‘Tanu Weds Manu Returns’ on the phone and were listening to it on their earphones (I have a splitter which lets them share both their earphones). But wait I didn’t have the movie on my phone. They had actually figured it out and were actually streaming the movie from one of the Video on Demand applications I had on my phone. I was relieved that they were busy.

This set me thinking. My teenage daughter was all along streaming music from her phone to my car music system and we were enjoying a mélange of songs. Most of these songs were not stored on the phone which actually removed the restriction on the number of songs we ‘carried’. We were literally carrying millions of songs.

And now coming to the back seat, the twins were enjoying the movie. They got a movie of their choice (in my house, movies which have a strong female protagonists are popular – 3 girls you see!) and were merrily enjoying it from the thousands of movies that VOD app had.

I have undertaken road trips in the distant past and mostly that meant packing our favorite cassettes or CDs or more recently buying and loading up songs on the ipod which was connected through the Aux mode on the car’s systems.  None of that. Today’s kids don’t have to ‘stock up’ on their favorite music for the trip. This was a departure from the past, when for me and my sister packing things for a trip meant collecting cassettes/CDs.  Today entertainment was available on tap. All of this was enabled by the high speed 3G data & 4G data networks of the modern day.

Great roads and Kishore Kumar playing on the car audio helped the mind. What if everyone gets a smartphone and gets connected to the high speed information highway. The clean and smooth NH-48 in a rhetoric sense now seemed like an information superhighway - high speed, obstacle free.

The Wonderful Highway to Vadodara

So here we were listening to songs which were chosen from amongst a million options, the twins were seeing a movie which they has chosen from amongst the thousands on the portal.. and we didn’t ‘possess’ any of these. What if this possibility were to replicate in every handheld device and in every household.

It was only last month that I had ordered the movie ‘Sultan’ from the comfort of my home and was watching it on my Apple TV when it struck me that I haven’t visited a multiplex in a long time. I prefer to watch it at home with no set timing. I also don’t watch the movie in one single sitting. I watch it over 2 or 3 days. The movie did very brisk business of over Rs300 crores in India. However when I look at the numbers in detail, I realize that just about 30Mn people have seen the movie in the theatres. Again, it was also a Salman Khan movie ‘Prem Ratan Dhan  Paayo’ which had the highest number of people watching it when it was telecast. The world television premiere of ‘Prem Ratan Dhan Payo’ on Star Gold and Star Gold HD was offered on Valentine’s Day. The movie delivered record TRPS and at closest estimate, it was seen by 70Mn people. So now, in a country of 1.3bn people and with a very established movie production business, the highest reach a movie could garner is no more than 100Mn… and that is if I take the best of both – people viewing in theatres and people watching on TV.

India produces over 2000 movies in a year and the movie business is nearly 3bn$.So if only 10-12% of this self-confessed movie crazy country watches a movie… where are the rest. Don’t they have the need for entertainment?

To put it in perspective, it needs to be understood that India has just about 8000 theatres (screens) for the 2000 odd movies that we produce. Compare that to China’s 25000+ for less than 1000 movies and US’s 40000+ screens for Hollywood movies and you get a sense of deprivation. So it’s not just the cost of watching a movie at the closest cinema… there just aren’t enough screens. And if you think that you don’t get tickets to a multiplex for the weekend…remember- it just gets worse outside the large cities.

New screens are going up at an excruciatingly slow pace given the costs involved (mainly real estate) and this presents a huge opportunity to the producers to showcase their movies on the ubiquitous screen – the smartphone screen. This is another opportunity for leap-frogging. What if the number of people who watch a movie now goes up from 100Mn to just 200Mn - assisted by distribution on a smartphone screen. And this 100Mn is for popular cinema. The numbers are much lesser for niche cinema, so much so that a regional language movie or a special interest/ niche cinema movie would not even find screens for a theatrical release. They would just be squeezed out of the theatres by big banners. Opportunities to showcase such cinema are immense on the smartphone screen. You reach just the audience who likes such cinema and could be spread in any corner of the country. All this without worrying about filling up cinema halls & hence running the risk of your movie being pulled down by the theatre owner.

Entertainment on the go

And this is not just about movies alone. The smartphone screen has been giving serious competition to other popular screen ‘the television’.

The second presidential debate between Clinton and Trump garnered a whopping 63 million TV viewers but this number dwarfs in comparison to the 124 million views on YouTube, 3.2million viewers on Twitter’s livestream and Facebook Live’s 7.4mn viewers (in partnership with ABC News). So 63Mn on television and twice that number on the smart screen. If this is a sign of times to come… look where we are heading.

The convenience of the smartphone screen is unparalleled. It’s your anywhere, anytime screen and if your family is watching the soaps, you can watch that cricket match. Why! HotStar has been claiming 100 Mn viewership for the IPL during the previous season.

It’s the same for Television. India has ~300mn households of which ~ 175mn are cable households (just over 50%) but Indians have almost 1bn mobile connections. Urban penetration stands on TV homes is at 83%, while rural is as low as 40%, but the divide is not so stark when it comes to mobile phones. What if Kapil Sharma were to reach so many people or households? What if Pro-Kabaddi League reaches the nooks and crannies of rural India? It would change the landscape media, sports and entertainment in the country for good. Everyone in the game - advertisers, broadcasters, producers and consumers tend to gain by going on the smartphone screens and if you are not present on the digital distribution channels you’ll be trampled over.

The Group

While I was in Vadodara, we went to the absolutely fabulous venues for Garba at Navlakhi grounds and the UWB (United Way of Baroda). The atmosphere there was electric. People of all ages in their best traditional costumes were swaying to the beats of the Garba. The more enterprising of them were dancing, the slightly less enterprising were watching from the sidelines but what was also intriguing was that I could see a lot of people going live through their Facebook accounts to share the awesome energy in the grounds. Almost every other person who I thought was shooting a video or clicking a picture was actually going ‘live’ to share the experience with their friends and family – real time.

At Vadodara Navratri Festival, Navlakhi Grounds

Where does all of this bring me to? Movies and Music streaming through the smartphone, Watching Live TV on the smartphone, real time video sharing of precious moments with friends and family again through the smartphone. Not that we don’t know the power of bringing all these things in the hands of the a billion consumers, it’s a revolution of sorts.

We have had data networks on our phones for a long time and we don’t need the 4G speeds or even the 3G speeds to update our Facebook Status or do an e-commerce transaction. The high speeds networks really make a difference when there is video involved. The smooth video rendition makes the experience worthwhile, not unlike the ‘buffering’ experience of the past.

So when I or my daughters get the power to carry millions of songs, thousands of movies, hundreds of TV channels and ability to relay precious moments to a dozen friends live from the palms of our hands, we know we have it all!!

And then when I think that government has auctioned spectrum to telecom companies, they haven’t really fuelled another telecom revolution, they have unwittingly propelled an Entertainment Revolution. Because that’s what this is! Do they know it yet though?