Last year, I joined The Signal, excited to write stories that dig deep into the complicated and ever-mutating business of media. The Impression was originally intended to be a newsletter on the creator economy. Eventually, it became your weekly primer on the business of films, streaming, music, news, social media, advertising, and everything else that holds this fascinating media monster together. 

As I hand over The Impression to the folks at The Core, I am signing off. This is my last edition. 

In these 65 editions and 16 months, The Impression swelled to over 8,000 subscribers. It covered some of the biggest stories shaping media in India – the Sony-Zee deal, the fate of Disney-Star, the post-merger struggles of PVR-Inox, the unstable future of streaming and news, and the technologies changing the way we are entertained and informed. 

I had the privilege of meeting several readers of The Impression during this time. Many of those conversations inspired new ideas and made stories in The Impression richer. 

Thank you everyone for being part of the ride! 

On to the final edition.

Money, Morals, and Indian Media

If you’re running any media business right now, you probably already know this is a trying time. Even leaders in India’s entertainment, social media, news, and other media businesses are struggling to figure out how to make money. Customer preferences are constantly changing but none seem to tend towards paying for content. As a result, the industry is going through a wave of consolidation, reducing competitive intensity and squeezing its pool of talent. Despite the consolidation, large firms aren’t exactly minting money. And above it all, the government seems determined to sneak in ridiculous laws that could kill what growth potential is left.

What factors will shape the future of India’s media & entertainment industry in the coming years? Here’s a breakdown. 

Bigger isn’t (always) better

Even as Reliance prepares to take over Disney-Star, consider the run the last media mega-merger has had. More than a year after PVR and Inox merged, India’s biggest multiplex chain is struggling to make money. Despite a dream box office quarter last year thanks to back-to-back hits, PVR-Inox has not managed to consistently recover from the pandemic (read more in this edition of The Impression). This June quarter, PVR-Inox’s revenue fell and losses after tax (pdf) rose as fewer films hit the screens and viewers stayed busy with the elections and cricket. 

This isn’t a one-off. As I explained in previous editions, exhibitors and film producers are locked in a downward spiral of risk-averse behaviour. That has left cinemas with long lull periods of few films while producers stake everything on extremely high budget projects, rather than releasing many lower-budget films. 

Meanwhile, consolidation among streaming platforms has already caused dramatic shifts in the business of web-series and other content. Amazon bought MX Player from Times Internet, Saregama acquired Pocket Aces last year, while Hotstar and Jio Cinema will soon be sister concerns. Streaming industry insiders tell me there is a marked slowdown in the number of projects being commissioned at all major streaming platforms. Some, like Zee5, had stopped taking meetings for new ideas entirely, although they have now resumed scouting for new projects somewhat. Others, like Hotstar, are also going slow and focusing more on “TV+” content, meaning web-shows with lower budgets and many more episodes, much more like Indian TV shows than high-quality originals. 

There is more work to do for platforms such as Amazon miniTV and (now) MX Player, but they typically look for lower budget “TV+” type content as well, since their business model is primarily ads, not subscriptions. For those wishing to make top-shelf content, the balance of power has shifted more decisively in favour of (primarily) Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. As one industry insider told The Impression: “you can either go back to doing TV, or try your luck breaking into films, or wait around for Netflix or Amazon, maybe Sony or Hotstar to greenlight your project. But they have plenty of choices.” 

In total, the drop in demand for high-budget streaming originals will have an impact on the production houses and independent creators that made significant money in the last seven years of the streaming boom. As of FY23, streaming success stories such as TVF and Applause Entertainment were already working on thin margins. 

Yet, the consolidation juggernaut will probably not cease. Sony is still looking to acquire a rival media business after its aborted merger with Zee Entertainment. In the news business, newly interested parties are putting together funds. Adani Group’s media arm AMG Media received Rs 900 crore from its parent firm in FY24, after acquiring legacy news brands NDTV and IANS. That’s much more cash than what it spent on both acquisitions. 

Damocles’ Sword

Nothing kills the media business faster than curbs on free speech. The Indian government does not seem to understand this or is perhaps unwilling to let any medium that allows its critics to thrive run without interference. 

The insecurity shows in the government’s efforts around the Draft Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill, 2024. First, the ministry of information & broadcasting has circulated copies of the draft to a select set of stakeholders rather than opening it to public scrutiny, as is standard for all proposed legislation. What’s more, it seems the MIB marked each copy with a unique watermark so that if one is leaked to the public, it can track the source. That’s a lot of corporate crisis management strategy for what is merely a piece of legislation meant to update a cable TV law from the 1990s. 

What is the government so nervous about? As Aditi Agrawal of Hindustan Times reported over the last few weeks, this draft proposes opaque and sweeping clauses that will stifle digital media altogether. 

Two major provisions are of particular concern. 

First, the draft stipulates that all platforms and individual ‘broadcasters’ will have to form a content evaluation committee, start a self-regulatory organisation, and appoint a grievance redressal officer for any complaints by any viewer of their content. This onerous compliance won’t just apply to massive multinationals like Netflix and Amazon but could also fall on smaller, independent creators such as, say, YouTube channels and Substack writers. 

Second, Hindustan Times reports the current draft of the bill has proposed that “news influencers” will also be considered “individual broadcasters” and brought under this law. However, the definition of a ‘news influencer’ is so vague, it could include anyone on any internet platform who comments on current affairs or provides knowledge, including podcasters, Twitter accounts, or Instagram curators of the news. 

Influencers like Ranveer Allahabadia and Kamya Jani, who often run interviews with political and business leaders and comment on public affairs could also be forced to appoint grievance redressal officers for their YouTube channels. Will this also apply to creators like Dhruv Rathee, who lives in Germany but creates for a Hindi speaking audience? How about Mr. Beast or Marques Brownlee, foreign creators with a large fan base in India? Without a public discussion these questions remain unanswered. It’s unclear if the authors of this draft have even considered the impact of their proposals on the way the internet works in 2024. 

What is certain is that if laws like these are passed, India’s media and entertainment business will be at the mercy of unprecedented levels of censorship. Besides, it is exceedingly difficult to monitor every corner of the internet effectively; it’s more likely that the thin-skinned authorities will use these laws to target creators and businesses they have a problem with, especially anti-establishment voices in both news and entertainment. 

Those in the business are extremely unhappy with this draft. Although the government is doing its best to keep it from discussions, RTI queries revealed industry bodies and civic society groups have criticised the legislation for poor understanding of how content creators on the internet should be regulated. 

A fearful, chaotic environment isn’t great for an already difficult business. Our vast population and rich cultural legacy mean India can make its media business its number one export, just like South Korea has done. But how long before Big Tech firms and international media companies decide India just isn’t worth the investment?

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Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Looking up: Listed Indian TV broadcasters had a better than usual June 2024 quarter, with a big jump in revenues due to growth in ads during this year’s prolonged election season. 

It’s vintage: Fintech firm Infibeam has acquired Rediff, one of India’s earliest digital news and content companies, for Rs 25 crore; Rediff was founded in 1996 by veteran ad executive Ajit Balakrishnan. 

Rebound: Social media firm Reddit Inc reported better than expected results, with revenues up 54% year on year led by growth in ad revenue and a massive jump in ‘other income’ including data licensing deals with platforms such as OpenAI. 

Meta has also forecasted better-than-expected growth in its quarterly revenues.  

Drops: Meanwhile, British advertising Big Four agency WPP downgraded its growth estimates for the year, expecting a decline in its China and domestic businesses to outweigh the growth from Europe, US, and India. 

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

Sports news websites aren’t likely to be flag-bearers of anti-establishment sentiment, or any political resistance at all for that matter. But some victories are borne out of so much pain, that even ESPN cannot help but contextualise them. 

This composite, going viral on almost all Indian social media, depicts wrestler Vinesh Phogat after her unbelievable win in the 50 kg women’s wrestling semifinals at the Paris Olympics. Phogat is now the first ever Indian woman to make it to wrestling finals in the Olympics; she beat an undefeated Japanese wrestling champion Yui Susaki. She is coming home with at least a silver medal (although latest reports suggest she may be disqualified for being slightly overweight, heartbreaking). 

She will also come home a symbol of resistance against India’s abusive political establishment. Phogat and other female Indian wrestlers have been leading a protest against BJP leader Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, the former president of the Wrestling Federation of India. He is accused of sexually exploiting several female wrestlers during his tenure at the WFI; you may remember that just last year, several protesting wrestlers including Vinesh Phogat were forcibly dragged away by the police from where they were protesting. 

Phogat, Sakshi Malik, and other protesting wrestlers have been at the receiving end of a vitriolic media campaign ever since. It started with this AI-manipulated photo of the wrestlers, purportedly smiling after being detained by the police. Then, top anchors at India’s leading news channels ran primetime narratives discrediting not just the wrestlers’ protests but also their sporting careers. 

We will probably be treated to a completely different narrative from the nation-loving media once the Olympics are over and Phogat brings home a medal, making India proud. The government may release a video of Prime Minister Modi congratulating Phogat on the phone, as he has done with other Indian winners this season. There are already memes about the PM preparing himself to make the call. 

Phogat probably won’t care though. Fellow wrestler (and protestor) Bajrang Punia told ESPN that Phogat promised to win gold in her last ever Olympics not for her career, but to “fight for the young women wrestlers who will come…so they can wrestle safely.”

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I’m on leave this week at The Impression, but I’ll be back next Wednesday!

In the meantime, I leave you with the top headlines from the business of media.

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Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Thanks for your support: The Karnataka state assembly passed a new bill introducing a (up to) 2% cess on the sale of movie tickets and streaming subscriptions. The money will be used to fund local cinema and performing arts. The bill is already facing opposition.

Cha-ching: After acquiring several struggling media companies, Adani Group has infused another Rs 900 crore in its media arm AMG Media Networks.

Raising more: After an exceptional performance this June quarter performance, Netflix is raising $1.8 billion in debt. The streaming platform last raised money via debt in 2020.

Ad money brawl: While Netflix gains a solid lead over rivals in paying subscribers, Amazon Prime Video is steadily undercutting it on ad rates, relying on its already massive retail advertising business.

Caged spectators: Even as accredited journalists protest to regain access to Parliament proceedings, field reporters have now been asked to stay within a glass enclosure in the premises. Lok Sabha speaker Om Birla has promised Opposition leaders and journalists to ease the restrictions.

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thecore.in with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, hit the button below to subscribe now—it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

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This week, PVR-Inox posted a terrible, but expected set of numbers. India’s largest multiplex chain had a piss poor June quarter. Revenue fell more than 8% year on year, and losses more than doubled. June 2024 has been a bad quarter for PVR-Inox on nearly every performance metric (pdf). Despite last year’s dream run at the box office, what is still going wrong?

Elections, Cricket, and A Summer of Discontent

In previous editions of The Impression (read more here and here), we’ve discussed how Indian theatres are struggling with a broken pipeline of films and low footfalls Now, they seem to have entered a vicious cycle as filmmakers hold back films for lack of footfalls and viewers hold off on visiting theatres for lack of films to watch. 

In the June quarter, this vicious cycle was even more pronounced. 

“The June quarter got impacted by the 2024 general elections, the second longest polling exercise in Indian history, prompting many producers to postpone releases,” PVR-Inox managing director Ajay Bijli told analysts in an investor call earlier this week. “We also witnessed a sharp decline in the number of blockbusters, only three films crossed Rs 100 crore on the box office,” he said. 

These included the sleeper Hindi hits Munjya and Chandu Champion, while the hit multilingual big-budget fantasy film Kalki 2898 AD did not add to theatres’ quarterly fortunes because it released only at the end of June. Besides, movies that were expected to become blockbusters, such as Bade Miyan Chote Miyan, bombed at the box office instead. 

The impact is clear. In the months of April, May and June this year, PVR-Inox had 3.5 million fewer admits. Revenues from the sale of tickets was down 14.5% year on year while sales of food and drink, usually a saving grace, also fell by just over 6%, although average spends per head increased by 3%. 

Average occupancy in the halls was at 20.9%, two percentage points lower than a year ago and still below pre-pandemic levels. And to top it all off, the multiplex chain faced more than 7% higher fixed costs (although it marginally reduced variable costs). 

The lack of films hurt PVR-Inox in another way: it had to bring down ticket prices. “What you have seen in this quarter is the lack of the blockbuster films,” PVR-Inox’s CEO Kamal Gianchandani told analysts in the call quoted above. “The consumer’s willingness to pay a higher ticket price is much more for bigger films and ‘obvious’ blockbusters. This is why you have seen muted ticket pricing.” For the June quarter, PVR-Inox’s average ticket price was Rs 235, down 4.7% year on year despite the multiplex chain’s plans to hike prices to keep up with rising costs. 

However, Gianchandani added, average ticket prices have risen this month as big-budget film Kalki draws audiences in droves. 

Jostling for space

Indian cinemas have been starving of good films all this year, so much so that multiplexes have resorted to re-releasing older films in bigger cities to keep viewers coming. The drought was worse this year. 

“[Film] producers took a view that they wanted to avoid a clash [of the general elections] with their [new] release,” PVR-Inox’s Bijli told analysts in the call quoted above. “The issue also got compounded that we had the T20 World Cup running pretty much at the same time, it also compounded the decision making around the releases.” Producers had postponed big releases during the 2019 general elections as well; the highest box office grossers of that year released in the second half of the year except Uri: The Surgical Strike that hit theatres in January. But producers worried more this year as the country held its longest ever elections, spread over nearly two months. 

Theatres tried to fix this year’s problem by screening crucial T20 matches and even news channels covering the general election results (read more about it in this edition of The Impression), but it could not make up for the lack of film supply.

PVR-Inox’s management says the next two quarters are looking better, as postponed big films prepare for release and Hollywood begins churning out blockbusters post the long writers and actors strike. These include Deadpool & Wolverine, Joker Folie A Deux, Pushpa 2, Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3 among others. 

But the ground beneath PVR-Inox’s feet may already have shifted a little. 

Despite a drop in average ticket prices, PVR-Inox remains a premium multiplex, keeping out customers who may not want to go to a single screen but can’t afford to pay more than Rs 1,000 for a movie outing for a family of four. PVR-Inox is only strengthening its grip in the premium end of this market. Many of its new locations are in high-end and new malls in bigger cities. The company’s management also pointed out that their customers were paying more money to upgrade to recliners, or their ‘Luxe’ and other pricier theatre offerings. 

However, PVR-Inox will have to contend with more competition from regional cinema chains that are rushing to offer a multiplex experience at a much lower price. In 2022, real estate group Kanakia re-entered the multiplex business with the MovieMax theatre chain, focused on cities and smaller towns in West India. Compared to PVR-Inox, MovieMax’s parent firm Cineline India has done well on the markets as well. In the last 12 months, Cineline’s share price went up over 46% while PVR-Inox fell 1.5%. 

Meanwhile, technology company IMAX is signing up with smaller, regional cinema chains to offer the premium big screen experience to more audiences at a lower price than PVR-Inox (read more in this edition of The Impression). In April this year, IMAX announced a partnership with Miraj Cinemas; a month later, it announced a similar tie-up with Rajhans Cinemas, starting with a brand new IMAX screen in Surat. 

Meanwhile, PVR is focused on expanding its presence in South India, where single screens and local chains thrive, eating into its share of box office earnings. 

In an ongoing consumer slowdown, will PVR-Inox generate enough business selling premium movie tickets? To do so, it will need to break this vicious cycle of apprehensive producers and bored customers. And fast, before the people permanently move their attention elsewhere.

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Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Cookie, crumbled: After generating global anxiety among advertisers for four years, Google is finally ditching its plan to kill third party cookies in Chrome, leaving its proposed replacement called the Privacy Sandbox in the lurch for now. 

Turn off the tap: As Apple’s streaming service fails to take off in the US, the company is looking to curb its spending on original shows and films, Bloomberg reports. So far, it has spent over $20 billion on content, including on awards favourites such as KIllers of The Flower Moon and Napoleon. 

Registers ringing: Music streaming service Spotify posted record profits and added 7 million paying subscribers in the June quarter. Higher subscription prices and last year’s layoffs helped boost Spotify’s financial performance. 

Deep digging: The Competition Commission of India has sent over a 100 queries to Reliance and Disney over the proposed merger of their media businesses, Reuters reported. The deal, which includes Star India, will combine India’s biggest TV, film, and streaming businesses. 

Giving up: Ousted former Marvel chief Ike Perlmutter has sold his entire stake in Disney after he and activist investor Nelson Peltz failed to dislodge CEO Bob Iger and secure seats on the company’s board. 

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

A brand-new generation is joining the voting population, and memes and fan-cam edits are running election campaigns now. India’s general elections were littered with memes featuring incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi and now leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi. 

Now that Harris, 59, has replaced the 81-year-old Biden, the memes have come for the US presidential election too. Younger American voters, jaded by a tired battle between two extremely old candidates, now have a (relatively) candidate to consider, especially because if Harris wins, she will be the US’ first female president. 

The Harris campaign is evidently aware of the power of memes and seemingly viral social media edits. In the tweet above, singer Charli XCX equated her with her latest album brat, in a nod to viral clips of Harris’ carefree laughter and ‘cringe’ dancing, an aesthetic that seems to appeal to younger voters. Soon enough. Harris’ campaign Twitter account rebranded itself in the same font and colour as the brat album and we are all awash in memes and vertical video edits of her dancing with abandon. Now singer Beyoncé has reportedly allowed Harris to use her song Freedom for her campaign. 

Just last week, in this section, we discussed the unintended consequences of historic moments (and photos). The attempt to assassinate Donald Trump has forced so much change so quickly, US election discourse has shifted from heated debates on dementia to brat memes. This year’s elections around the world make one thing clear: future political leaders will spend way more time building their image in the weird recesses of the internet than in shiny, polished public appearances.

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thecore.in with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

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Earlier this year, Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath invested in the Mumbai-based talent management and media firm Collective Artists Network (CAN), taking over the stake once held by InMobi’s Glance. 

Earlier this month, it bought a storytelling and marketing agency Terribly Tiny Tales for an undisclosed amount. 

These events, along with other recent changes among India’s biggest talent management agencies, mark a changing point in the business of managing talent. 

What can legacy and new-age talent management firms learn from CAN’s journey so far?

CAN’s Blueprint for Modern-Day Talent Management 

In 2021, talent management firm Kwan rebranded itself as the Collective Artists Network. Company filings show that in its first full year operating as CAN, it made over Rs 113 crore in revenue from operations with a net profit of Rs 18.2 crore. A year later, revenue rose 80% to over Rs 200 crore, while net profits more than doubled to just under Rs 40 crore. 

At its height, Kwan was best known for managing top film and sports stars including actress Deepika Padukone and tennis champion Sania Mirza. In 2012, it set up a joint venture with US-based Collective Artists Agency (CAA) to collectively manage talent across South Asia (although it was dissolved four years later). In 2019, it partnered with Sony Music India’s publishing arm to form Big Bang Music, a joint venture representing a slew of independent, largely urban-focused Indian artists.

CAN is carrying forward Kwan’s interests in creating IP and owning brands from publishing music to creating consumer goods brands fronted by their top talent. For instance, CAN had already tied up with Kamath’s Gruhas to set up a Rs 150 crore fund for early-stage consumer startups. Last year, it acquired Under 25 Universe, a student community firm that organises college events and sets students up to become campus influencers and secure marketing gigs. This fits in with CAN’s social media influencers business Big Bang Social, that offers brands a ‘marketplace’ of social media influencers for their marketing needs. 

CAN’s expansion into a social media, entertainment, and IP business reflects in its rounds of fundraising as well. While traditional agencies remain bootstrapped or strike deals with production houses, CAN has had a diverse set of investors. In 2021, digital advertising firm InMobi’s subsidiary Glance invested Rs 15 crore in the company. Along with this deal, it also secured funding from the Mumbai-based alternative investment fund (AIF) Nepean Capital. As of FY23, it held just over 27% of the company, giving partial exits to individual shareholders as well as the Glance InMobi, which reduced its stake from 10% to just above 8% during the year, company filings show. 

Fits and starts 

CAN’s filings also show the difficulties in scaling up a network of various entertainment and social media ventures like this. While CAN has remained profitable at the consolidated level until FY23 (it is yet to file financials for FY24), many of its ventures are still in losses. 

Big Bang Records, its indie music label, made Rs 4.68 crore in revenues in FY23, but with losses of Rs 2.41 crore. The previous year, it had a higher topline—Rs 5.58 crore in revenue—but with losses worth Rs 5.53 crore. 

CAN also wound down several celebrity-led brands that it launched over the last few years, including DCraf, a personal care brand fronted by actor Rana Daggubatti and EK, an apparel and accessories brand headed by director-producer Ekta Kapoor. 

CAN’s joint venture Glance Collective ran these brands, also to feed into its video commerce business Roposo. The company’s filings show in FY22, the company made Rs 1.22 crore in revenue from operations with losses of just over Rs 16 crore. The next year, revenue grew manifold to Rs 13 crore, but losses more than doubled to Rs 36.4 crore. 

Talent management firms aren’t new to building celebrity brands. Matrix Entertainment has a successful joint venture with beauty e-retailer Nykaa in Kay Beauty, the cosmetics brand fronted by actress Katrina Kaif. In FY23, Nykaa-KK Beauty made Rs 60.5 crore in revenue and Rs 6.8 crore in profits after tax. Social media personality Raj Shamani also launched a venture called House of X in September 2022, promising to help social media stars to quickly launch their own consumer brands. House of X is backed by VC firm Lightspeed and a long list of consumer startup founders including Nikhil Kamath (again), Vidit Aatrey (Meesho) and Varun and Ghazal Alagh (Mamaearth). 

CAN’s newest acquisition, Terribly Tiny Tales, is a rare profitable social media venture. In FY23, it made just under Rs 8 crore in revenue from operations, up from Rs 6.5 crore the previous year. It made profits worth Rs 19.5 lakh, up 26% from the previous financial year. 

However, in CAN’s larger picture, Terribly Tiny Tales is a small piece, financially and in the scale of its operations. However, it brings not only a network of creators but also monetisable IP, including short films, podcasts, and web series. 

The takeaway 

The larger lesson from CAN’s metamorphosis is that the differences between traditional talent management firms and ‘new-age’ social media influencer agencies are getting erased. Merely making commissions from the work brought to top film and sports stars may not be enough to scale up in this business. 

Already, talent management firms across the board have been joining hands and consolidating operations. In December last year, Matrix Entertainment acquired rival Bling. In 2020, production house Dharma Productions formed a joint partnership with sports talent management firm Cornerstone, best known for managing cricketer Virat Kohli. The venture, known as Dharma Cornerstone Agency or DCA, has been branching out of its roster of film stars to include singers and musicians and social media personalities and paparazzi favourites such as Orry (Orhan Awatramani). 

More agencies will branch out to lines of business they aren’t already in to span film and sports stars, social media and influencer marketing, new IP, and personalities in new forms of entertainment.

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Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

In the money: Zee Entertainment is raising $239 million via offshore bonds foreign from investors, the company said in an exchange filing today (pdf). It has been cutting costs and looking for funding ever since a merger with Sony Corp failed. 

Bill and miss: The Indian government has added more provisions to a draft of the controversial Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill but hasn’t shared a revised version with stakeholders yet, Hindustan Times reported. The bill seeks to regulate online news, OTT platforms, and other digital content platforms. 

Keep appearances: News anchor and India TV chairman Rajat Sharma has been elected as president of the News Broadcasters & Digital Association unanimously. He is also suing a political spokesperson for defamation where the evidence doesn’t seem to be in his favour. 

Another one: One more millennial media company in the US stands accused of fraud. Carlos Watson, founder of Ozy Media, was found guilty of defrauding investors and faces up to 37 years in prison. His co-founder was accused of impersonating a YouTube executive in fundraising calls. 

Jackpot: With over $1.25 billion in global box office earnings, Inside Out 2 became Pixar’s biggest film ever, bringing relief to the animation studio struggling with box office duds and extensive layoffs.

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

Photojournalists’ careers are defined by iconic images, almost always captured when they’re unexpectedly thrown into a moment in history. The trouble is that these photos may become iconic in ways that the journalist may neither have intended nor expected. 

This photo of a shaken but triumphant Donald Trump, taken by the Associated Press’ Evan Vucci moments after an assassination attempt, may come to define the 2024 US elections. It has already drawn comparisons with Iwo Jima and made it to the tattooed limbs of some of his ardent supporters. His opponents worry that a pump-fisting Trump against the star-spangled banner may have cemented his return to the American Presidency, while Vucci says he is merely satisfied with a job well done. 

Could Vucci’s photograph have the power to alter events this year? It’s worth considering the unexpected influence photographs like these can wield over history. Consider this story of British photographer Platon, who waited amid intimidating guards for over eight hours to get a portrait of Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2007, when he was named Time magazine’s Man of the Year. As Platon tells it, Putin loved the photos and the Russian authorities were keen to have it in a museum exhibit as well. 

But, ten years later, Putin banned a version of the portrait, dubbed ‘gay clown’, after it became the symbol of protests against his crackdown on rights for sexual minorities in the country. How’s that for making history?

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thecore.in with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

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Mumbai has been under the weather (quite literally!) and so have I, so I don’t have a feature story this week. Instead, take a look at the top media & entertainment headlines from the week gone by. I also have a short note on the (never-ending) Ambani wedding.

Also, this week’s recommendation: do read this column by Vanita Kohli-Khandekar in Business Standard. Vanita argues that Indian filmmakers are struggling with picking the right window to release their film so that it can have a decent opening weekend. Already, many weekends of the first half of this year were occupied with the elections, the IPL, and then the Men’s T20 World Cup. The Indian audience is spoilt for choice. 

Vanita also points out that live events like the Ed Sheeran concert and the relentless supply of OTT originals like the latest seasons of Mirzapur and Panchayat are also getting the audience’s attention. What are we going to do with all this content? 

I’ve also explored some of these themes in this and this edition of The Impression. 

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Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Done deal: Finally, Paramount Global has a new owner. David Ellison’s Skydance Media is taking over the storied Hollywood studio for more than $8 billion. New CEO Ellison has promised to cut $2 billion in costs and reduce the company’s debt which may be downgraded to ‘junk’ despite the deal. In all, the deal emphasises Hollywood’s diminishing might. 

Cord, cut: India’s top four direct-to-home satellite TV companies collectively lost 3.28 million active subscribers in FY24 as streaming companies offered cricket for free online, The Economic Times reports. 

(Some) respite: Streaming platform Spotify’s India arm cut losses by 26% to Rs344 crore in FY23, while its revenue grew by 86% to Rs167 crore, company financials show. 

Don’t say that: News wire service Asian News International (ANI) has sued the Press Trust of India for copyright infringement and plagiarism in the Delhi High Court; separately, it has also sued Wikipedia for defamation. 

Don’t do that: India’s Supreme Court has fixed guidelines for depicting people with disabilities in the media in passing an order a petition filed by disability rights activist Nipun Malhotra against the film Aankh Micholi. 

Bot com boom: The Washington Post has debuted its own chat bot to answer readers’ queries based on its own reporting. For now, it only answers questions about climate. Several US publishers and social media companies have signed content sharing deals with OpenAI and other AI platforms. 

When will Mukesh and Nita Ambani’s youngest son Anant finally marry? Since the first pre-wedding event in Jamnagar in March this year, we are getting served endless content from the Ambani scion’s seemingly never-ending pre-wedding festivities. 

The Jamnagar event raised questions about the way the Ambanis set up Vantara, a private animal rescue shelter run by Anant who is reportedly passionate about animal rights. Then, European media reported Italian locals were annoyed by several ‘loud’ guests of the Ambanis hopping off their party cruise last month. 

Now, as we get snippets of the Ambani family’s sangeet featuring Justin Bieber and an army of Bollywood stars, public reaction seems to be bordering on fatigue. It’s odd to see the usually serious Mukesh Ambani recreating an old classic song in a vintage car with his wife and grandchildren (as in the tweet above). There are endless posts breaking down the super-expensive couture outfits worn by the bride Radhika Merchant and speculation around an outfit chosen by the Ambani groom as well. 

Good news for media organisations though: trend desks of all major news organisations have used this sea of Ambani content to publish analyses and ‘netizens react’ stories (me included). The only questions now are: a) can the actual wedding surpass these over-the-top events? b) is the Ambani family at all worried about the impact of all this over-exposure? 

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thecore.in with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

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When was the last time you set Google Maps to guide you by voice to your destination as you drove? Remember when you picked up the TV remote and asked it to search for your favourite web series? Have you been tinkering with font size on your phone or setting every social media app to dark mode? 

When Google launched voice-enabled search in India in 2009 (only in English), it was meant to bring internet search to feature phone users who did not have access to cellular internet, then a luxury inaccessible to most Indians. More than a decade later, as voice search incorporated more Indian languages, Google announced that Indians were using it twice as much as users in the rest of the world. 

Voice search is one of those features we have grown accustomed to, much like closed captioning in our OTT shows and YouTube videos. 

But we fail to acknowledge that voice-enabled search, closed captions, and many other commonplace internet features were first designed to be used by people with disabilities. And yet, mass media and internet companies in India aren’t even thinking about being more accessible. A clutch of small and (more recently) bigger companies are trying to change this. 

But first, they need to popularise the idea that accessibility is for everyone. 

Can Indian media make accessibility a business? 

Accessibility in Indian mass media has never been part of the mainstream. Rather, it is associated with the launch of special (read: separate) products and facilities dedicated only to those with disabilities. For example, India has several newspapers in Braille. Veteran journalist Swagat Thorat has been running Sparshdnyan, a Marathi language newspaper written entirely in Braille for visually impaired readers since 2008. Last year, Reliance Industries’ charitable foundation for the visually impaired, called Reliance Drishti, also launched a Marathi Braille newspaper. It has been publishing one inHindi since 2012. 

In 2022, Nagpur-based nonprofit TBRAN launched Radio Aksh, an internet-based radio station for the visually impaired, accessible via an app. But with 500+ downloads on Google’s Play Store, it has limited reach. Another initiative is the Mumbai-based India Signing Hands, which offers movie and ad translations into sign language (among other services). It also runs ISH News, a YouTube channel that offers news and content in sign language. ISH News has over 449,000 subscribers on YouTube. 

Consider international news websites such as the BBC, which had its team rebuild its websites, apps, and other digital products with accessibility built into the design. The BBC’s former Head of Accessibility Gareth Ford Williams explained in this blog post how his team built accessible features into all BBC apps including a revamped video player called BBC iPlayer. For most in the news industry, BBC is the gold standard for accessibility in media.  

“The thing with accessibility is that most Indian websites are either not accessible or only partially accessible such as Scroll or The Hindu,” says Chitranshu Tewari, director of product and revenue at subscription-based news service Newslaundry. “When news outlets in India think of accessibility, they are usually only thinking about the story pages. But they will likely not include accessibility features on other products such as podcasts, videos, e-papers, or even payment pages for buying a subscription.” 

Earlier this year, Newslaundry launched NewsAble, an initiative to make its website and app accessible for a wide variety of people with disabilities including filters for colour blindness, special fonts for people with dyslexia and ADHD, and a range of voice-enabled features. While accessibility features tend to focus most on people with hearing and visual impairments, Tewari says many of these features are meant simply for people with regular ageing problems. 

“A lot of the features we have used can actually be used by anyone,” he says. “A lot of controls around fonts or text can also be used by someone who has weak eyesight or is just old. Voice search, for example, makes a better product not just for people who are not lettered, it is just used by everyone, it is an accessibility feature.” 

A good example of this is streaming, where closed captions with text descriptions of audio are now included as default on platforms such as Netflix and YouTube. 

Business case

Given how much news and media organisations are struggling to grow in India, can one reasonably expect accessibility to be a top priority? Tewari argues that accessibility isn’t just some matter of charity. “I see this overlapping with a subscription model,” he says of Newslaundry, which runs entirely on subscription revenue. “If a disabled user is giving Rs 500 a month, why should they be discriminated against? As more newsrooms go towards subscription models, disabled users will also demand more accessibility features.” 

That’s a sentiment shared by Shilpi Kapoor, founder of accessibility consultancy BarrierBreak. “People with disabilities want to do things the same way as us - shop online the same way, buy tickets in the same way,” she told The Impression. “Roughly 15% of the world population has disabilities. In the Indian context, that is a very large number of consumers. Companies need to look at this as a business opportunity and this is a very loyal captive audience.”

Kapoor’s BarrierBreak offers accessibility audits to companies looking to add more accessibility features to their websites, apps, and other consumer products. However, she points out, most of her clients are companies building for audiences in the US, Europe, or Australia, where laws make it mandatory for websites and apps to have basic accessibility features. “The laws in the west are more strict,” she says. “You can be sued if your website in the US, for example, is not accessible.” 

India has a Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, passed in 2016, but it does not specify rules for making content accessible for people with disabilities. 

Is there a case to be made for accessibility as good business? There have been very few attempts by mainstream, large organisations in India. Among recent examples is Star Sports, which launched separate feeds with sign language interpretation of cricket commentary in this year’s Indian Premier League, and in the recently concluded T20 Men’s World Cup. Star also launched audio descriptive feeds for visually impaired people on TV as well as the OTT platform Hotstar. 

However, BarrierBreak’s Kapoor points out there are few advertisers or other commercial takers for platforms built largely for people with disabilities. The company runs a news platform called Newz Hook, designed to make news consumption easy for people with a range of physical and cognitive disabilities. “In 2020, when Covid hit, we took a pause,” she says. “Newz Hook was funded by BarrierBreak but the idea was always to create a sustainable business. But apart from BigBazaar and Amazon, no one gave us ads or sponsored content.” At its peak, Newz Hook’s app and website collectively had 40,000 monthly active users. 

India’s discourse around accessibility is still nascent, largely couched around charity or an occasional feel-good spend, largely for publicity or done via dedicated nonprofits. For product teams and developers to think about accessibility, they may have to undertake the kind of dedicated exercise that the BBC conducted for its news and entertainment platforms. 

“The product space in news is very small, and there are no conversations around accessibility, no one is even talking about it,” Newslaundry’s Tewari says. “Since we launched NewsAble, some people have shown interest in these features.” 

But all said and done, it isn’t easy to roll out a good product designed around accessibility. “It is quite easy to make a website or app accessible when you are setting up a new one,” Tewari points out. “But most newsrooms have 10-15 year old tech stacks.”

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Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Bye-bye Tweety: Indian Twitter (now X) rival Koo is shutting down, founder Aprameya Radhakrishna announced on LinkedIn. The Morning Context reported the platform shut down after news and social media firm DailyHunt refused an offer to acquire it. 

Will she, won’t she: Shari Redstone may sell Paramount after all; The Wall Street Journal reports David Ellison’s Skydance Media has signed a preliminary agreement to buy the firm. 

Separately, Paramount is also in talks to sell its Black Entertainment Network for $1.6-1.7 million, per Bloomberg. 

No comfort: Chicken Soup for the Soul – whose self-help books were a staple of the Millennials – has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US.

New friends: The News Broadcasting & Digital Standards Authority, comprising India’s top TV channels, has invited digital news organisations to join the self-regulatory body. Prominent digital news organisations founded their own body called DIGIPUB in 2020. 

Tiny deal: Talent management firm Collective Artists’ Network acquired social media fiction company Terribly Tiny Tales for an undisclosed sum.

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Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

After a long time, Indian social media is awash with memes and meme-able moments from… parliamentary debates. Remember those things that our elected representatives are supposed to do in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha to safeguard our rights and advance our interests? For years now, a greatly weakened Opposition has meant few debates on anything material has made it to our TV screens and YouTube feeds. All that changed earlier this year with the BJP returning to power in a coalition rather than a simple majority.

A strong Opposition is always good news for us citizens, but it’s probably much better news for mainstream TV channels that have been starving for content and turning to choreographed interviews with Prime Minister Narendra Modi for their programming. All this week, major English and Hindi general news channels were dominated by scenes of ‘uproar’ in both houses of Parliament, featuring speeches from opposition leaders such as Mallikarjun Kharge, Akhilesh Yadav, Mahua Moitra, Rahul Gandhi, Asaduddin Owaisi, and A Raja, all of whom squarely targeted the government on a wide range of issues such as the NEET exam leaks, crumbling infrastructure projects, and repeated attacks on minorities. 

Not just TV, mainstream media is also flooding their YouTube channels with recorded compilations and live broadcasts of ‘fiery’ Parliamentary speeches. This video by Hindi news platform Lallantop (owned by India Today) gained over 1 million views in less than a day and is on YouTube India’s trending list. 

Will a coalition government help news channels recover their fortunes and find a new, more engaged audience that doesn’t care for ‘Dear Leader’ interviews? As columnist Vanita Kohli-Khandekar pointed out in this piece last month (a point also made in this edition of The Impression), news channels aren’t serving a large base of consumers. Perhaps fiery Parliamentary speeches can be their way back to better journalism (and business).

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thecore.in with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, hit the button below to subscribe now—it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

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After a rough first year on the bourses, Zomato’s fortunes seem to have changed, at least in public perception. A major reason is the exploding valuation of, and investor interest in the quick commerce business. Zomato’s BlinkIt may now be the more valuable part of the company, bringing in more customers, repeat transactions, and fat margins from in-app advertising. 

This year so far, Zomato’s stock price is up more than 62% compared to a 9% bump in the benchmark Nifty 50 Index. Clearly, its valuation as a food and grocery delivery company is on the rise. 

So why is it thinking of buying a ticketing and events company?

Zomato Wants New Customer Inroads

First, a recap. Earlier this month, Zomato told investors in a stock exchange filing (pdf) that it was in talks to buy Paytm’s movie ticketing and events business. Per The Economic Times, the transaction could value this business at Rs 1,600-1,700 crore. 

Zomato isn’t new to the entertainment business. In 2018, it launched Zomaland, a food and fun carnival that allowed attendees to sample fare offered by its partner restaurants. A year later, it launched Zomato Originals, a set of food-focused web shows streaming on the Zomato app. The company shut that offering down soon enough (read more about Zomato’s entertainment investments in this edition of The Impression). Besides this, Zomato has been building a ticketing vertical within its food ordering app under the ‘Zomato Live’ tab. Among events available to book are comedy shows, live T20 Cricket World Cup screenings, concerts, and even entry tickets to a water park.

Zomato runs its events business under its subsidiary Zomato Entertainment Pvt Ltd, which was set up in 2018, the year it launched its flagship Zomaland. In FY23, per latest available filings, the company made a turnover of Rs 52.9 crore, with losses of Rs 24.5 crore. Zomato Entertainment was a loss-making business in the pre-pandemic years too. In FY20, it made Rs 10.31 crore in total revenue, up nearly 2.5 times year-on-year while its total loss for the period was Rs 5.28 crore, down over 25% year-on-year. 

But Zomato isn’t in a hurry to make this profitable. Rather, it wants to see how selling tickets to gigs in a city while programming its own live shows can help it build a ‘going out’ segment beyond its mainstay home delivery business. 

“There are two pieces to [the] going-out business segment: dining out business and also, the events and ticketing business (Zomato Live),” Zomato’s chief financial officer Akshant Goyal told investors in a call (pdf) in February this year. “We are in a build-out phase here. The idea is both acquiring restaurants and creating [a] supply of events and onboarding ticketing partners. All of that requires investment.” 

Apart from the initial investment in the events vertical, Goyal said the company expected to spend heavily on building a team dedicated to the events business. In the short-term, it’s treating this as an experiment that will run up losses.  

“[We expect] the top line, which is measured by GOV [gross order value] here... to continue to grow,” Goyal said. “But both monetisation in terms of revenue growth and eventually profitability growth will take some time and grow with the lag… the amount of commission we charge is not the focus area right now. The idea is to first create a large enough network here of restaurants [for dining out]. And similarly on the event side, a large enough supply of events.”

Make It Large

If the immediate aim isn’t to generate cash, why not ramp up the experiment? 

That could explain why Zomato is interested in acquiring Paytm’s events business, comprising ticketing and events production under Insider.in. Company filings show that Wasteland Entertainment, the parent firm of Insider, hasn’t had one profitable year since Paytm acquired it in 2017. Little wonder then that Paytm is keen on offloading as it fights bigger fires in its main payments and loans business. 

What this also means is that Zomato or any other potential buyer can drive a hard bargain for the business that contributes little to either Paytm’s topline or bottomline. In FY23, Wasteland Entertainment posted revenue of over Rs 192 crore, up more than 4x from the previous pandemic year, while it made losses worth Rs 19 crore, down by over 25%. In FY18, the company made more than Rs 97 crore in total revenue but posted losses of Rs 10 crore. Paytm spent nearly Rs 150 crore as equity investment in Wasteland Entertainment last fiscal, but the company contributed just about 1% to the company’s bottomline, Paytm’s FY23 annual report shows. Meanwhile, Paytm Entertainment Ltd is an even smaller (but much more profitable) entity, with Rs 4.4 crore in turnover and Rs 3 crore in profit after tax. 

Selling tickets and events contributes less than 20% to Paytm’s overall turnover. 

For Paytm, which wants to refocus on payments and loans, it makes sense to get rid of anything that can distract it from rebuilding its core business. 

While Zomato can get the business at a bargain, it would know that even in the long-term, events aren’t an infinitely scalable, cash-generating business. Consider BookMyShow. In FY23, it made just over Rs 1,000 crore in total revenue with profit after tax worth Rs 85 crore, a slim 8.5% margin. In the previous fiscal – a pandemic year – it was in losses. 

For Zomato, the appeal of buying a ticketing and events business isn’t so much in its ability to earn a lot of money. Rather, it will bring a new kind of customer to the app; mostly high-earning and urbane (with spending data), and likely to fit well with the ideal customer profile of Zomato’s existing food delivery, quick commerce, dining, and events business. 

As Zomaland has shown, events are a successful way to augment existing lines of business, including food delivery, dining out, and advertising. E-commerce companies worldwide are increasingly chasing revenue from retail advertising, especially now that Amazon has shown it is possible to break through the two-decade long dominance of Google and Meta over the digital advertising business. In the first quarter of 2024, Amazon made $11.8 billion in ad revenue, up more than 24% year-on-year. 

For Zomato, events have served as both a brand-building tool and can also help it expand its advertising business, which generally comes with bigger margins. For an aggregator like Zomato, kiosks, sponsorships, and plain-old hoardings at an event are brand new forms of advertising to offer clients (such as restaurants), a rich addition to its existing ad inventory of search results and sponsored posts. 

Besides, data on the people attending an event will help Zomato build better insights into its existing (and potential) customer base, helping it become a stronger internet consumer company. Zomato isn’t alone in this endeavour. Last year, beauty retailer Nykaa held its inaugural ‘Nykaaland’ event in Mumbai, featuring partner make-up brands, celebrity make-up artists, and live musical performances. Nykaa co-produced the event with market leader BookMyShow. 

As consumer internet companies get serious about the events business, its basic nature will likely undergo a change. So far, companies like BookMyShow and the ‘90s leaders like Percept and WizCraft were valued as event producers that merely generate cash from the shows they organise. For new-age players like Zomato and Nykaa, events will probably act as a marketing and brand-building arm, doubling as rich advertising inventory, and become a funnel for detailed customer data.

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Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Contingency: As Bytedance approaches a January deadline to divest from TikTok’s US arm, American advertisers are planning alternatives fearing a ban on the video app or a decline in its usage, the Financial Times reported. 

IP Damaged: More than 25 copyright infringement lawsuits have been filed against AI companies in the US by artists, authors, music labels, news publishers, and other creators so far. The plaintiffs are collectively seeking damages of about $350 million. 

Another one: More niche streaming platforms are signing up for bundling deals in India. The latest is Sony Corp’s anime-focused service Crunchyroll. 

New toy: Zee Entertainment owner and CEO Punit Goenka acquired single screen theatre company Maverick Media in a personal capacity for an undisclosed amount. 

Fresh biz: Big Four media group IPG is in talks with Tata Consultancy Services to sell its Madison Ave digital marketing firm R/GA, best known for its work for Nike, The Wall Street Journal reports.

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Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

This week, India’s market regulator Sebi is holding a board meeting to consider various proposals including a set of guidelines to prevent ‘finfluencers’ from spreading misinformation. Since last year, Sebi has been cracking down against purveyors of hot stock tips, including YouTube and Telegram channels running pump-and-dump schemes, news anchors engaged in front-running, and prominent finfluencers offering derivatives advice without Sebi registration. 

But what can Sebi do when a former RBI governor shows up in Telegram and WhatsApp chats offering investment advice? 

This week, Raghuram Rajan took to LinkedIn to warn the public against fake videos of him purportedly recommending specific stocks for investment. Some comments on his post suggest the videos looked obviously fake – as is the case with most AI-generated videos – but that novice investors and less savvy viewers could easily be taken in by them. 

Curbing AI-generated misinformation is as big a (if not a much bigger) problem for Indian regulators. While Sebi can run a year-long investigation to act against people demonstrably involved in market manipulation, it isn’t in a position to trace the source of deepfakes spreading potentially market moving information. Can the IT Ministry step in effectively? Maybe. It has already been heavily criticised for rather regressive policy proposals to regulate AI.

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thecore.in with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, hit the button below to subscribe now—it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Subscribe now

In last week’s edition of The Impression, I wrote about the uphill battle that writers in the Indian entertainment industry have been waging for decades. They have resigned themselves to working for poor pay, getting lesser importance and credit than directors, and foregoing any share in royalties or profits generated from the stories they write. 

The Mumbai-based Screenwriters’ Association (SWA) is trying to change that, this time, with some legal pushback. 

Can India’s Writers Pull Off An IP Coup? 

In the 1950s, film producers in newly-independent India began interfering in the relationship between writers and directors, insisting that they would decide who fills both roles in the movies they make. As film writers saw their freedom and power erode, 80 of them signed up to be part of a trade union. In 1954, in the presence of 24 of these members, a film writers’ association was born, with a promise to enrol more writers. Among the first members of this early version of the SWA were legends of the Hindi film industry including KA Abbas, Shakeel Badayuni, Sahir Ludhianvi, and Kamal Amrohi, who later became a director and founded Kamal Amrohi Studios.

In the 70 years since, the film industry has changed beyond recognition. In the last decade alone, more corporate and now Big Tech money has made its way into the Indian entertainment industry. But producers’ chokehold over the industry and consequently, the writers, hasn’t changed much. 

Why don’t screenwriters, even those who are among the SWA’s 66,000 members, find any value in their trade union? 

“I don’t think the SWA functions effectively as a trade union because it does not have any power against producers in the film industry,” a film, TV, and web-series writer told The Impression on condition of anonymity. “Look at any effective trade union in India or anywhere in the world. What makes it effective is strong political leadership and representation. The SWA does not have leadership like that. What power will it exert in an industry where its members are systematically exploited?” 

Yet, there are other writers who say the SWA’s authority has found respect among a few producers. “If you file a complaint about copyright infringement through the SWA, I have seen it work,” film and web series writer Vaibhav Suman told The Impression. “The producer of a Punjabi film I worked on received a complaint from the SWA just days before its release. A writer alleged that the makers had used his creative concept. He had copies of emails he had exchanged with the filmmakers. The producers acted immediately and settled the matter with the writer as fast as possible.” 

But as I wrote last week, most writers consider the SWA a body that helps offer (some) protection of their original ideas from copyright infringement. “I haven’t used the union for anything else,” the first writer quoted above says. “I don’t know any other writer who has, or any famous case where a SWA member has successfully fought back against a producer.” 

Union Levels Up 

The SWA’s leadership says it knows about these drawbacks. 

“When I became a writer back in 2008, I also thought the SWA was only a place to register your scripts,” Saiwyn Qadras, member of the SWA’s executive committee told The Impression. “But we realised that we have to show writers we [the SWA] are with you, through the ups and more importantly, through the downs of the business.” 

That meant expanding the usefulness of the SWA to beyond just a repository of registered, protected scripts and ideas. “One big event we used to do was the three-day screenwriters’ conference where new and aspiring writers could come and meet established writers, attend master classes, understand how their contracts should be written, and how we can help them when they don’t get their dues.” 

The SWA offers free legal representation to its members (up to Rs 5 lakh) and runs a Dispute Settlement Committee to mediate disputes between SWA members and other film professionals, usually producers. It is also working on offering minimum basic contracts and standard rate cards for writing film, TV, and web-series scripts. 

The union’s second aim was to get itself taken seriously by the film and entertainment industry, especially all-powerful producers. “Now the SWA has built immense credibility among studios, platforms, and producers,” Qadras says. “They actively engage with a screenwriters’ body and listen to us about the minimum basics that all writers should be given and how credits should be formulated. These conversations weren’t possible in the early 2000s or even for a long time after.” 

More recently, the SWA has invested in other events including a union writers’ award ceremony, a 2-day annual pitchfest allowing writers to pitch their stories directly to interested producers, and smaller events such as last month’s Sab Khairiyat (translation: All Okay?), a panel discussion covering the mental health struggles of film and entertainment writers. 

Is this all enough? Maybe not yet. “It’s great there are now events for our mental health,” the first writer quoted above says. “But you know the biggest source of writers’ mental health problems? Lack of money and respect.” 

Grabbing The Bag 

For the SWA to become as effective as Hollywood’s striking writers’ union, the WGA, it will first need to secure writers the copyright to their work and the money it makes for everyone involved. That means enforcing a legal framework that applies to all writers in the film and entertainment industry, not mere producer negotiations and writers’ events. 

Now, the SWA is negotiating with the government to set up a copyright society for writers. 

“Getting a share of royalties has been a big issue, a struggle for writers for as long as films have been made in India,” Qadras says. But that might change. “We have succeeded in reaching out to the central government bodies to get a green light for a copyright society for screenwriters, just like there is one for singers and musicians. In a year’s time, these formalities should get sorted out.”

That copyright society is the Indian Performing Rights Society, a copyright society for musicians, singers, lyricists, and other musical artists set up in 1969. The IPRS collects music royalties from labels and pays them out in a set formula to its members. In 2012, the Indian parliament passed an amendment to the Copyright Act that entitled musicians to lifetime royalties on the music they create. Writer-lyricist Javed Akhtar, then a member of parliament, played a crucial role in building overwhelming support for the amendment across party lines. He is now the chairman of the IPRS. 

The 2012 amendment allowed the IPRS to begin collecting this money from music labels and pay it out to their artist members. 

But if the IPRS’ experience of dealing with music labels is anything to go by, the SWA has a long, arduous battle ahead of it in its quest to build a copyright society. The first step could be to simply shift the balance of power away from producers in line with copyright law. 

“In 2012, the music industry did not accept the Copyright (Amendment) Act,” top music industry executive Achille Forler told The Impression. Forler is the founder of SyncMama and former managing director of Universal Music Publishing India, which acquired his independent music publishing firm Deep Emotions in the 2010s. “So they sent out emails to producers to tell them how to circumvent the law. They would ask music labels to discourage musicians from registering their work with the IPRS so they would not have to make any royalty payments.” 

Just like film and entertainment producers, music labels exert disproportionate power and influence over the Indian music industry. Consider this: T-Series, India’s largest music label, became a member of the IPRS only in 2021, nearly a decade after the copyright law was amended. Before that year, musicians and lyricists who worked on songs for the label weren’t entitled to any royalty payments. 

Besides this, running the IPRS is a time-consuming, costly affair. Twice a year, employees of the copyright society cross reference usage reports from music streaming services and other data regarding the music consumption in India with their database of registered musical artists. That allows the IPRS to determine how much royalty payment each member is entitled to during the half-yearly period under review from the commercial use of their music. In India, this is largely from streaming platforms, although it can include other forms such as the use of a song in a film, TV show, or web series. 

In FY23, the IPRS had total expenses worth over Rs 31 crore, largely in employee expenses, per its annual report (pdf). That year, it also paid out over Rs 564 crore in royalty payments to its members. In FY18, it had collected just Rs 45 crore in royalties. 

This bi-annual matching exercise can get complicated if musicians use different spellings of their names in their credits, for example, or if new artists register long after their work has been in circulation. 

“Metadata is the oil of this whole industry,” Forler says. That data helps the IPRS identify when a music label, platform, or another music user isn’t paying their fair share of dues. 

All these are challenges a writers’ copyright society will also have to face. But before it can get to questions of expensive data matching and fighting to get producers to pay, it has to establish some basic foundations. 

“The SWA has been engaging with writers’ bodies of other Indian film industries to get them on board with a single copyright society,” SWA’s Qadras said. This copyright society will need to run a new membership drive, ensuring all active film, TV, and web series writers sign up to get royalty payments. “Members will have to pay separate fees to join the society. We will have our own new fee structure, which will help fund the body that will operate the copyright society,” Qadras added. 

It’s early days, and the union is merely in talks with the government and other associations to lay down the foundations of this copyright society. But once it is established, a writers’ copyright society will be the first concrete step in the SWA’s 70-year history in securing concrete rights for Indian writers. There’s a long battle ahead, and for the leaders of the SWA, it isn’t about immediate benefits for themselves. 

“First, the writers need to see that there is someone who is willing to fight for their rights,” Qadras says. “So when a call for ‘pens down’ ever comes in the future, it will actually lead to pens down. We have great leaders in the SWA such as [scriptwriter] Anjum Rajabali, who has spoken about these issues doggedly for so long. There are younger writers in the executive committee who are managing their day job while working on these issues [of writers’ rights]. We [younger writers] are getting to see the fruits of their [older writers] labour and it is both encouraging and overwhelming.”

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Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Busy bee: Newly-reappointed Minister of Information & Broadcasting Ashwini Vaishnaw has been holding talks with Big Tech firms concerned over the proposed Digital Competition Bill, including an association of digital publishers and gaming federations. Separately, the ministry is considering regulating ‘professional’ content creators such as YouTubers. 

Juggernaut: Zomato is in talks with Paytm to potentially buy the latter’s movies and events ticketing business (pdf). It also earmarked Rs 100 crore to invest in its entertainment vertical that runs events such as Zomaland. 

Netflixland: In a move straight out of the Disney playbook. Netflix is opening two ‘Netflix Houses’ in two American cities next year, featuring themed experiences based on hit originals including Squid Game, Bridgerton, and Stranger Things. 

Bought: Sony Pictures has acquired Alamo Drafthouse for an undisclosed amount. The American theatre chain pioneered dinner and drinks while watching movies. 

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

Indian animation and visual effects studios are responsible for the stunning frames of some of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters, from the superhero films of Marvel Studios and Pixar’s heartwarming tearjerkers to James Cameron’s latest saga, Avatar: The Way of Water. We have the talent to make our own epics with beautiful artwork and top notch special effects. 

Instead, what we have to show for local innovation is just… plagiarism. Upcoming multilingual, multistarrer Indian film Kalki 2989 AD should have been an achievement given its special effects and art. The film is a dystopian epic set in the distant future and centred around Kalki, the last avatar of the god Vishnu, who is prophesied in Indian mythology to come and protect humanity from total destruction. Looks like the film’s makers, led by Hyderabad-based Vyjayanthi Movies, weren’t concerned about the total destruction of their reputation. A reputed South Korean artist, Sung Choi, who has worked on Marvel and Pixar films, found that the movie stole an entire frame of his artwork that was first posted to his Art Station account 10 years ago. This isn’t a case of “more than inspiration”. As this screenshot of Choi’s instagram story demonstrates, Kalki’s makers have used his art with very few changes. 

How much more of the film’s artwork is plagiarised? Already the film’s trailer, with its sandy setting and yellow hues, is giving off a somewhat Dune-like vibe. 

Remember: the Indian box office desperately needs a big, national hit this year. Kalki could be it, but Hollywood knockoffs can’t lure an audience that has plenty of global entertainment available on TVs and mobile phones. If this film bombs, we may be stuck with more re-releases of films from the 2000s and the 2010s.

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thecore.in with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, hit the button below to subscribe now—it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

Subscribe now

When the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) called “Pens Down” this time last year, few would have bet Hollywood would come to a stop the way it did. The Screen Actors Guild joined the WGA soon enough, repeating a historic labour strike that last took place in the 1960s. In some ways, this one was even more devastating; the theatre business was only just figuring out a post-pandemic reality, and the billions of dollars on the line this time belonged to Big Tech, not just Hollywood moguls. 

The strike was successful. WGA writers have minimum guarantees for the work they do for streaming companies, and actors have extensive protection from the use of generative AI. These changes will have far-reaching consequences for the future of entertainment. 

Good news for writers worldwide. Just not in India. 

 On The Road To Indian Writers’ Rights

When Vaibhav Suman first applied for a Screenwriters’ Association (SWA) membership in 2011, he had already co-written the now cult film Pyaar Ka Punchnama. He had also had a disagreement with the film’s director Luv Ranjan over the credit he should get for his work. At that time, he wasn’t an SWA member yet. He was finally credited for additional screenplay and dialogue only.

Even since then, Suman has worked on several projects in the Hindi and the Punjabi film industry, apart from streaming originals. Even so, he hasn’t found much cause to fight over writers’ primary woes: credit, money, or contracts. 

“You don’t want to fight with people because you are doing fine,” Suman told The Impression. “Yes, sometimes the credit you are getting may be less than what you should get. But you don’t fight because you are working with people who are talented, you are getting paid well, and ultimately, you have to work with people.” 

Both the WGA and its Indian counterpart, the SWA, were founded in 1954. Yet, seven decades later, the fortunes of the writers they represent could not be more divergent. The WGA, along with the SAG-AFTRA, led a historic strike against not just Hollywood’s biggest studios (as it had in the 1960s) but also Big Tech firms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, which have become increasingly more important to the business of entertainment in the US. 

India’s Screenwriters’ Association, a registered trade union, has similar ambitions. The nature of India’s many film industries, traditionally dominated by family-run production companies, has held the SWA’s ambitions back. The result: writers have accepted exploitative terms of employment that run counter to all international norms of payments, contracts, and credit in film, TV, and now streaming originals. What’s worse, nothing seems to have changed with the arrival of Big Tech streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime.

What is going wrong? 

Money, Contracts, Credits

Many film and entertainment writers’ problems aren’t new. Writers are usually paid poorly, given little importance in the execution of their project, and almost never offered a share in the intellectual property rights of profits from a film or show they wrote. Across film industries in India, writers work for a fixed fee and sign off copyright claims to the producers bankrolling the project. 

That’s not the case in the West. In the US, for example, writers and creators continue to earn from TV shows they may have written years, or even decades ago. Every time a TV show like Friends or How I Met Your Mother is licensed, syndicated, dubbed, or broadcast in a new territory, everyone who had worked on the project receives a share of the proceeds by law. In that sense, consider a TV show or film as a co-operative: everyone earns, not just the producer or the people who bankrolled the project. 

One of the Hollywood strike’s demands was to extend these copyright protections and payouts to the work writers do for streaming platforms as well. In India, though, that conversation hasn’t even started. 

The West has a robust system of royalties that is recognised and accepted by all stakeholders in the industry,” Sanchi Sehgal, senior associate of business and legal affairs at talent management firm Tulsea, told The Impression. “This is not the case in India; with the film industry, it exists somewhat usually at the studio’s discretion, but there is no such recognised structure in the series business. There are no royalties in series, even for senior talent.” Mumbai-based Tulsea is best known for managing a roster of top writers and directors and negotiating contracts at par with international norms. 

In various Indian film industries, writers are expected to relinquish any rights or share in profits to their work in exchange for a fee. The result: unlike in the US, they do not earn a share of the long-term earnings of a project. 

“There is no defined waterfall of royalties either,” Sehgal said. “The way it works in the West is that there is a predetermined industry-wide structure jointly agreed upon by the unions for producers, actors, directors, and writers that captures the percentage of profits that all key stakeholders on a project, including writers, will receive and in what order. This does not exist in India which prolongs negotiations because every producer has their own preferences and mandates.”

For example, agencies like Tulsea often agree to a lesser upfront fee for their top talent when a production house is still figuring out a budget. This can be adjusted against a future share of profits or other bonus structures. “However, the conversation on how those profits will be calculated, or whether such conversations will even be rationally entertained, differs with each production house,” Sehgal says.

Then there is the problem of getting money on time. Film and TV writers are unique in that they largely tend to work freelance, signing up for individual projects rather than getting full-time employment with a production company. These contracts tend to be exploitative, forcing problematic clauses and including payment terms that favour the big guy. One such set of terms is the practice of ‘approval based tranches’, where writers are paid a tranche of money only when their work is approved by a producer, not when it is submitted on time. 

“Legacy production houses are often adamant on approval-based tranches and will not entertain submission-based tranches,” Tulsea’s Sehgal says. “We always fight for submission-based tranches simply because there is a significant gap between the kickoff point when the producer commissions the writer, the point when the writer submits the first draft of a screenplay and when the producer finally reads and approves the draft after asking for changes.” This gap in time can go up to 45-90 days or even more in some instances. The nature of freelance work makes writing an already precarious profession. Payment terms like these make it that much harder for young writers to make a sustainable living. 

Precarious earnings was the subject of a prolonged debate in an event held by the Screenwriters’ Association in Mumbai called ‘Sab Khairiyat?” (translation: All Okay?), inviting writers to discuss their mental health struggles as they balance the high cost of living in Mumbai with the uncertainty of freelance work, along with the burnout and loneliness of the creative process. 

Apart from infrequent pay and unfair contracts, writers are also struggling with getting credited correctly, or in some cases, getting credits at all.

On its part, the SWA is working on minimum basic contracts (MBCs) for writers of films, TV shows, and web originals. These MBCs are meant to set industry-wide standards on how fair contracts should be drawn up to safeguard the rights of writers and ensure they are adequately compensated and correctly credited.

Suman, who has worked in the even less organised Punjabi film industry, says writers often negotiate credits right until the end. “A basic contract does not even exist even when you’re working with the best OTT platforms and production houses,” he says. “You may not even be sure what credit you will get for the work you do [on a script]. That often gets negotiated just as the film or show is about to be released.” 

Suman cites a quote from fellow writer Varun Grover and his own experience on film sets. “No director or producer who has made a suggestion on set asks for credit as an art director or a cinematographer,” he says. “But when they offer feedback on a script, they will often ask to share credit for writing. Why is that?”

Who Runs The Show? 

“We often see producers offer untenable options for credits,” Tulsea’s chief operating officer Raghvendra Kumar told The Impression. “That drove us to write a Tulsea Insights memo on how credits should ideally be accorded as per the role and contribution across different aspects of the project’s life cycle.”

One bone of contention is the idea of the showrunner, a role borne out of the streaming era where Big Tech platforms commission long, episodic entertainment, being unlike the traditional film and TV formats. 

In the West, it is common practice that the creator of the show will be the head-writer, and will also serve as the showrunner,” Radhika Gopal, Tulsea’s head of writers and directors, told The Impression. “They move up the writers’ room ladder over years, sometimes decades, to arrive at the position of being the creator. This is not the case in India yet, but we are hoping we will get there with concerted efforts.”

“The credits of 'series created by' and 'executive producer' goes to the writer,” Gopal adds. “This is an established practice, but it is not the case in India.” 

Gopal points out, as do other writers in the business, that India’s film and TV executives are used to seeing the director as the ‘captain of the ship’ who takes creative control. Most top executives in India’s streaming industry come from years of traditional film and TV experience. 

“We have received pushback from certain producers or platforms executives when we have positioned a seasoned writer as the showrunner or asked for ‘Created By’ credit,” Gopal says. “They may insist that the director should get that credit because they are ‘the captain of the ship’ and rationalise Executive Producer credits to be reserved for executives from the production house only.” 

The idea of a showrunner isn’t new, but the title is unique to India. In most other markets, including Hollywood, the creator and writer of a streaming show is credited as an executive producer, a title that is both misunderstood and considered ‘too high’ for a mere writer.

“We have had producers ask us, ‘what does a showrunner even do?’” Nisarg Malde, senior manager for business and legal affairs at Tulsea, told The Impression. “We have seen examples of shows where the production company has taken the credit for ‘created by’ and refuse to give it to the writer because they believe the ‘written by’ credit suffices.”

A rare example of a writer successfully getting credited per international norms is Sudip Sharma, creator of Amazon Prime Video’s hit Hindi web series Paatal Lok. Sharma carried on the project: writer, creator, and executive producer aka showrunner. 

However, most streaming platforms and production houses continue to offer showrunner credits to directors or producers of their projects, not the writers. It is yet another way in which writers are blocked from getting greater creative and monetary ownership to their work. 

Fighting Back 

For most writers, including experienced ones, the only way to claim a profit share or copyright on their work is to transition to being directors and producers of their films and shows. 

That should not be the case, given the existence of the SWA. Yet, writers say being a member of the SWA does not guarantee an equal seat at the table or the ability to fight back against exploitative producers. One Mumbai-based film, TV, and web series writer says his SWA membership has only helped him register scripts and story ideas to prevent copyright violations. “If your script is SWA-registered, that is something everyone still respects in Bollywood,” he told The Impression on condition of anonymity. “But apart from that, I have not used the SWA’s services for anything else.” He has been a member for just under a decade. 

Writer Saiwyn Qadras, a member of the SWA’s executive committee, agreed that many members tend to under-utilise what the union had to offer. “When I became a writer back in 2008, I also thought the SWA was only a place to register your scripts,” he told The Impression. “But we have a lot more. We have to show writers that there is a desire to safeguard their rights.” 

What is the SWA doing to level the playing field for writers? More importantly, as films, TV, and streaming suffer a slowdown and shift in audience preferences at the same time, will they be able to make an impact against producers’ stranglehold over the entertainment industry? More on that in part two next week. 

Last Scroll Down📲

Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Galloping: The global ads market is set to grow ahead of expectations at 7.8% this year to be worth $990 billion (minus US political ads) and will surpass $1 trillion next year, according to media investments firm GroupM. Better US economic conditions and a change in GroupM’s prediction models  led them to revise their previous estimates. 

No deal: After months of speculation, Shari Redstone has ended talks with Skydance to sell Paramount Studios, her storied but now struggling business; the two sides could not agree to a valuation and payment terms that would work for Paramount’s complicated shareholder structure. 

Tick tock: Advertisers have until 18 June to start filing self-declaration certificates for every possible kind of ad on a new portal run by the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting as ordered by the Supreme Court (pdf); ad execs were unable to get relief in a meeting with the ministry and may file an intervention petition with the Supreme Court. 

Ads bonanza: Snap and Spotify became new destinations of choice for political ads this election season, per The Hindustan Times. While the BJP spent nearly Rs 20 lakh advertising on Snap, both the BJP and Congress ran ads worth an unspecified amount on Spotify. 

Assault on the press: Even as the courts release Newsclick founder Prabir Purkayastha, the Delhi Police is questioning reporters of The Caravan for allegations of disturbing religious harmony; the FIR was filed even as the accused reporters were attacked by a mob while reporting on the 2020 Delhi riots. 

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

Influencer campaigns are usually intense: meant to take over a massive audience and run for a short period of time to boost a main campaign. The main campaign is now over for Narendra Modi, who just took oath as India’s Prime Minister a third time last week, although it did not deliver the results (400 paar?) that the client had hoped for.

Why is PM Modi asking his followers and (presumably) paid influencers to turn the campaign off? In a tweet this week, Modi thanked voters for giving the NDA government (not the BJP or the Modi government) a mandate for the third time. However, he specifically requested his fans and admirers (not just voters) to remove ‘Modi Ka Parivaar’ (Modi’s family) from their display names on Twitter, an initiative that ran throughout the campaign season this year. 

Adding a catchy phrase to their display names is not a new marketing tactic for the BJP’s so-called IT cell. During the 2019 elections, Modi pitched himself as a ‘Chowkidar’ (watchman) while internet admirers and members of the IT cell added ‘Main Bhi Chowkidar’ (I am also a watchman) to their display names in solidarity with the marketing campaign. Once re-elected, Modi dropped the Chowkidar and over successive months, most others on Twitter followed suit. 

So why the urgency to abandon Modi Ka Parivaar? One explanation could be that Modi is toning down the ‘I, Me, Myself’ pitch in his public addresses. As this story in Scroll points out, Modi has stopped referring to himself in third person in speeches since the results were declared. Instead, he is making repeated reference to the National Democratic Alliance or NDA, the BJP-led coalition that he now leads at the Centre. Contrast this with the election campaign: not only were Modi’s speeches littered with self-references (including this famous interview where he claimed to be divine), the BJP’s manifesto also named all its electoral promises after the Prime Minister. 

Now that the client is selling a new product – a coalition government held together with unreliable allies – perhaps the BJP urgently wants to tone down the Modi personification. After all, ‘India is Indira, Indira is India’ is still a reminder of the Emergency imposed by the former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thecore.in with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, hit the button below to subscribe now—it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

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June 4, 9:00 am: I made my way to a single screen theatre in a busy district in Andheri East, Mumbai, where white collar workers scurried to reach their offices. This time was different: for once, I wasn’t sure what to expect after walking into the auditorium.

That’s because MovieMax Andheri was showing the 2024 election results. 

Inside the Elections Theatre Experience

MovieMax began selling tickets to ‘Election Results 2024’ for limited locations last week, but soon expanded to include a larger number of screens in its network, all for Rs 99. What would it be like to watch election results on the big screen in a dark theatre? Unlike movies or even cricket matches, watching the news as votes are counted is hardly an immersive experience. Rather, it’s a frantic one where people often surf through news channels searching for updates and analyses, often supplementing what’s on TV with scrolling through social media feeds.

I was the only person in MovieMax Andheri when I walked in yesterday morning, though one other patron joined shortly after. The cinema chain was showing Times Group’s Hindi news channel Times Now NavBharat, hosted by consulting editor and anchor Sushant Sinha. But with no means to change channels or discuss what was unfolding with other people, all that was on offer was a shouty news ‘debate’ on a big screen with very loud speakers. 

But in MovieMax Goregaon, another single screen in a Mumbai suburb, I found three elderly gentlemen sitting side-by-side, peacefully watching the Times Now NavBharat broadcast. One of them, an 86-year-old who goes by Parmar, said he was happy to be in the neighbourhood theatre watching the news. 

“It is very peaceful here, there is no one to disturb you,” he said. “I have a nice TV at home but the screen here is brighter and the sound is clear. We will leave by noon though.” 

A MovieMax usher told me the election results broadcast was scheduled from 9:00 a.m. until noon. However, counting for hundreds of seats went on until late into the night, with some nail-biting finishes in crucial constituencies coming in during the late evening. 

For MovieMax, this was an attempt to experiment with programming and test audience reactions rather than a money-making exercise in an ongoing content drought. “The election season was on and there was anyway a lot of excitement around it this time,” Ashish Pandey, head of programming and strategic initiatives at Cineline (MovieMax’s parent firm), told The Impression. “We wanted to play alternate content in cinemas and give patrons a different experience as well. We had already experimented with showing a livestream of the Ayodhya Ram Mandir inauguration.” 

Pandey explained that while MovieMax’s single screen theatres ran the election broadcast from 9:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m., the company’s multiplexes dedicated a screen to the programme until 2:00 p.m. “The timeline was an issue. Movies run for 3-3.5 hours max. But obviously election results start from early morning and can go on until the evening. But by 3:00 p.m., most election trends are clear, so we thought of carving out a six-hour slot for this show,” Pandey said. 

Besides, MovieMax kept entry to the election showing open well after the morning start time. Usually, theatres close ticket bookings for a show around 45 minutes after it begins. 

Need to experiment

Was this election experiment a successful one for MovieMax? Anecdotally, I saw less than ten seats booked for the show in most MovieMax locations across Mumbai. Although Cineline’s Pandey declined to share detailed figures, he said the experiment did its job of providing insights into audience preferences. “Our expectations were not that high,” he said. “We just wanted to see how different programming works out. We kept ticket rates at a bare minimum to see how many people would come.”

Cineline, owned by the real estate firm Kanakia group, re-entered the cinema business two years ago with most of its screens primarily in Maharashtra. The MovieMax theatre I visited is a single screen previously operated by the market leader PVR; some of the interior design, concession stand signs, and other elements of visual design are still visible. 

The drought of content has hurt all cinema chains across the country. While PVR-Inox posted an 11% increase in revenue for the March 2024 quarter, the multiplex leader slipped into losses (pdf). Similarly, Cineline posted a 27% growth in revenue for the quarter but also posted a loss before tax (pdf). 

Given the uneven performance of ‘big’ films on the box office, cinema halls are likely to keep experimenting with their programming line-up. Already, the ongoing ICC Men's T20 World Cup is scheduled to be screened in major theatres. “We are playing the T20 World Cup from June 5, and we have already sold over 1,000 tickets for the India-Pakistan match for this Sunday,” Cineline’s Pandey told The Impression. 

Last month, bigger rival PVR-Inox hosted a two-day horror festival called GenreCon, with films and gaming-like experiences at its swanky Lower Parel location in downtown Mumbai. After the IPL, World Cup matches will be screened in theatres across the country. If big films continue to underperform at the box office, we may see more such non-movie events in theatres in the coming months.

Last Scroll Down📲

Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

More money: The board of Zee Entertainment will meet on June 6 to consider raising funds via private placements, qualified institutional placements, or other available methods (pdf). 

Meanwhile, Sony Pictures’ CEO told investors the company was exploring other acquisitions in India. Sony India’s longtime retiring CEO NP Singh will be succeeded by former Star executive Gaurav Banerjee. 

Bagged: Amazon Prime Video may finally buy Times Internet’s streaming service MX Player for $50 million. Talks over a deal fell through last year. MX Player is expected to fit in with Amazon’s ad-run entertainment platform, miniTV. 

Music to my ears: Streaming service Spotify hiked its prices in the US last week for the second time in 2024, sending shares up more than 5%. 

Done deal: Iconic Hollywood studio Paramount has agreed to a merger with Skydance and may announce a deal formally this week. Paramount management skirted merger questions at a shareholders’ meet, but warned there will be layoffs. 

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

You might think it can’t get any worse, but this was a terrible week for the credibility of mainstream TV news channels in India. 

Studios were festive over the weekend and this Monday as they blared exit polls predicting a landslide victory for Narendra Modi’s BJP in the Lok Sabha elections. These polls pushed markets to hit all-time highs on Monday as psephologists and polling company owners explained to voters why the Modi wave was back. 

None of that was true. The BJP failed to secure a majority in the Lok Sabha on its own and at 240 seats, it won far, far fewer seats than exit polls predicted. Exit polls (ideally) have one job: to predict the outcome of an election. They failed. In one sad moment, Axis My India’s Pradeep Gupta burst into tears in the India Today TV studio before anchors consoled him. Gupta had once danced in the same studio four years ago as his predictions came true on counting day for 2020 Assembly elections. 

Mainstream TV news has been suffering a crisis of credibility and viewership. Will it recover from the body blow it received this week? Exit polls will be a crucial part of their programming later this year too as major Indian states such as Maharashtra and Haryana go to polls for the Assembly elections. Will these polls draw interest, ridicule, or any attention at all from the ordinary viewer? 

Consider this: a coalition of independent newsrooms received nearly 600,000 views on its YouTube livestream of the election results, which ran entirely ad-free and was funded by subscribers. deKoder, run by former NDTV owner Prannoy Roy, received 1.9 million views on its election livestream. Two channels run separately by former NDTV journalists Sohit Mishra and Sanket Upadhyay garnered over 200,000 views each on their livestreams, and a post-results satirical piece by Ravish Kumar grabbed nearly a million views. 

A YouTube channel is still far from the power and reach of a TV channel. But this year’s disastrous exit polls are yet another step in the slow but steady tilting of the balance of power from traditional mainstream news to experimental newsrooms mushrooming online.

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thecore.in with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, hit the button below to subscribe now—it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

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Call it unfortunate or good for mainstream business, but states like Gujarat have a large consumer base for Hindi language entertainment. Despite a long history of theatre, cinema, music and other performing arts, Gujarati language entertainment remains a low priority for India’s biggest streaming platforms. Besides, several mainstream films and TV shows are set in the Gujarati milieu, such as the movies of director Sanjay Leela Bhansali and the erstwhile ‘K-serials’ of the 2000s made by TV legend Ekta Kapoor. 

Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and other top-tier streaming services have poured money into Tamil and Telugu entertainment, garnished with an occasional title in Marathi, Kannada, Punjabi or Bengali. Gujarati doesn’t figure on most lists. 

Yet, there are people investing in original Gujarati films and web series. Some are even betting that viewers will pay to stream.

Testing: Gujarati viewers’ propensity to pay 

Hindi film actor Ajay Devgan’s latest Hindi film Shaitaan was a moderate success at the box office. The film was a remake of the Gujarati horror hit Vash. That’s not his first link to Gujarati entertainment. Last year, he launched the trailer of Gujarati film Hu Ane Tu in Mumbai. And in 2017 he set up NY Cinemas, a chain of affordable theatres for small towns, including Bhuj and Surendranagar in Gujarat. 

Yet, Gujarati cinema isn’t a money spinner. In 2023, Gujarati films had lower box office collections than the previous year due to fewer footfalls. 

But for Saurabh Srivastava, Shemaroo Entertainment’s chief operating officer (digital business), Gujarati entertainment is an opportunity waiting for someone patient.

“In Gujarat, nobody made an attempt because it is well-served by Hindi content,” he told The Impression. “The fruit is not hanging low unlike other regional languages’ markets. You get instant play as soon as you create an app or a TV channel in a south Indian language or in Bengali or Marathi. In Gujarat, you don’t., For big Hindi channels like Star Plus and Bollywood theatrical collections, Gujarat is already a big market.” 

Yet, the company’s streaming service ShemarooMe has doubled down on Gujarati, offering movies and web series, that too behind paywall. Vash, the movie Ajay Devgan remade, is a ShemarooMe exclusive online. In the quarter ended March 2024, the platform released 13 new Gujarati titles, including films, web series, and plays (pdf). 

Srivastava argues that high consumption of Hindi entertainment doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no hope for Gujarati entertainment. “Some stories which will require regional languages to have a soul and be powerful,” Srivastava said. “We think there is a huge scope for Gujarati in that.” He cites the example of the 2019 National Award winning film Hellaro, about the struggle of a group of women to perform the traditional garba against the wishes of the men in their village. “Yes, this story can be made in Hindi also but we think it won’t be as powerful or strong in that language. It is so entrenched in the [Gujarati] language and culture.”

When Indian streaming boomed during the pandemic, several platforms dedicated to Gujarati language entertainment hit the market, including CityShor and OHO Gujarati. 

But cultivating an audience that is perfectly fine watching their stories and culture in Hindi is an uphill task. That would explain why streaming majors such as Netflix and Amazon have largely stayed away from big releases in the language. 

That may not be the only thing holding them back from Gujarati investments.

Money and stars

“This [the Gujarati entertainment business] is not a big profit-making industry just yet,” says Mahendra Sharma, founder and CEO of Ahmedabad-based publishing and entertainment platform Matrubharti. “It is very difficult to make and sell your own content and also promote your own platform. Getting your app downloaded is a big, big challenge. And then after downloading, most people are not ready to pay. Consumers are ready to spend money on ‘branded’ content, meaning bigger projects with a big star and a recognisable face.”

Given the dominance of Hindi film stars in north and west India, there are no similarly big faces in the Gujarati film and TV industry yet. Besides, the Indian consumer’s low propensity to pay for online goods is well-known (read more in this edition of The Impression). 

Matrubharti’s Sharma argues that even today, a Gujarati viewer is more likely to spend money on theatre tickets for a big budget Hindi film with a star than on the latest Gujarati release. Some Gujarati titles have made a small profit, but that was possible because they received some funding from the state of Gujarat and kept their budget to a tight Rs 1-2 crore. “We are also not getting any instant recovery of the investment,” he said. “For web-based OTT content, you either recover a part of the cost by selling your rights or you put it on YouTube and hope to recover your cost over time.” Matrubharti releases some of its original web series on its YouTube channel that has just under 9,000 subscribers. 

Shemaroo already has a nearly decade-old YouTube business with two channels and over 120 million subscribers combined, offering songs, popular film snippets, and even full-length feature films. The company made just under Rs 64 crore in digital revenues in the quarter, up 20% year-on-year. But the majority of that growth came from its B2B business, aka syndicating its IP to other platforms. But these digital bets are yet to impress investors; shares of Shemaroo Entertainment are down over 60% in the last five years compared to the benchmark Nifty Media, which is down just over 14%. 

But in the business of original Gujarati content, it wants to distribute directly. 

“We are right now purely pushing behind the SVOD game because we think we have a good enough value proposition to get people to pay,” Shemaroo’s Srivastava says. “We are creating a market in Gujarati. The best way to test it is to see the consumer’s propensity to pay. If we win that and then scale up from there, then we will evaluate advertising at a later stage. We need to build first that kind of scale and test different models of consumption. We will have some advertising at some point of time obviously because we have a differentiated audience of Gujarati [language] consumers.” 

Shemaroo can draw comfort from the success of Bengali language streaming service Hoichoi, run by Kolkata-headquartered film production and distribution firm SVF Entertainment. In FY23, Hoichoi made nearly Rs 66 crore in revenues with a minor profit of Rs 26 lakh, company financials show. Revenue from operations was up 29% although profits fell to about a fourth, year-on-year.

“One platform that seems to have a sensible, sound business is Hoichoi,” Shemaroo’s Srivastava says. “We have to understand that everybody comes from a certain right to win. Bengali is a huge market both in and outside India. They are well entrenched in that as a player in content creation. They are also serving the whole market of West Bengal and Bangladesh.” 

Shemaroo’s right to win may come from being a family-run business run by Gujarati entrepreneurs from Mumbai, the nerve centre of India’s biggest entertainment industry. Just like its counterparts Hoichoi and (primarily) Telugu language platform aha, ShemarooMe is also targeting the Indian diaspora that speaks Gujarati. To get bigger, it will have to not just convince viewers to ditch widely-available mainstream Hindi for authentic Gujarati fare, but pay for it too. 

Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated Saurabh Srivastava’s designation. He is chief operating officer- digital business at Shemaroo Entertainment.

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Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Bat-ball bonanza: TV industry body Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) estimated this year’s edition of the IPL had 546 million viewers in all matches except the last seven; JioCinema may have received nearly 600 million viewers near the end of the season, The Economic Times reported. 

Deal/no deal: Disney is selling its nearly 30% stake in cable TV operator and streaming aggregator Tata Play back to the Tata group, Bloomberg reported; however, a Mint report claimed the Tatas aren’t interested in the stake sale. 

Feed isn’t buzzing: After buying a 8.3% activist stake in BuzzFeed, entrepreneur and Republican leader Vivek Ramaswamy is demanding changes including more board seats and budget cuts and issuing an apology for its news coverage on alleged links between Russia and former President Trump. 

Riding the wave: More e-commerce firms are waking up to the ads business. PayPal is the latest planning to build a digital ads business using its data from millions of shoppers around the world, The Wall Street Journal reports. 

🍿problems: Multiplexes and single-screens are running a ‘Cinema Lovers Day’ on May 31, offering tickets at Rs 99 apiece amidst a dry spell for the movie business. In the US, Furiosa opened to lacklustre numbers, marking the worst Memorial Day weekend for the movies in decades.

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

When you win an international film award whose past recipients include legends like Andrei Tarkovsky, Park Chan-wook, Lars von Trier, and Asghar Farhadi, many will want to bask in your success. You may not mind sharing it with your alma mater, and with the institutions of your country. At any rate, we Indians are quick to claim the victories of anyone with a vague Indian connection (remember the hype around NASA astronaut Sunita Williams?). 

However, this time, filmmaker Payal Kapadia’s success at the Cannes Film Festival has come with a lot of pushback against those trying to claim her success. The Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) tweeted this week to congratulate her for winning the Grand Prix, the second-highest award at the Cannes Film Festival for her feature film All We Imagine As Light. But it neglected to mention that it still has a pending legal complaint against her and other students for protesting the appointment of actor Gajendra Chauhan as the FTII president nearly ten years ago. In 2017, the FTII had suspended scholarships and foreign exchange programmes for all students who participated in the campus protests. 

FTII isn’t alone in the race to claim some credit for Kapadia’s historic success. The National Film Development Corporation claimed that India’s Ministry of Information & Broadcasting co-produced her film (which isn’t strictly accurate), while several ruling party leaders including Prime Minister Narendra Modi congratulated Kapadia as well. 

Maybe it’s a sign that India’s conservative establishment is opening up to free expression. All We Imagine As Light hasn’t announced a theatrical release in India yet. Will Kapadia’s previous hit, A Night Of Knowing Nothing — set against widespread student protests against the Modi government — get a chance?

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thecore.in with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, hit the button below to subscribe now—it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

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In their 2022 application with the Competition Commission of India, PVR and Inox had argued that their merger — between India’s biggest multiplex chain — wouldn’t create a monopoly. After all, the vast majority of Indians watched movies in single screen theatres or local cinema chains. Despite a complaint from a consumer advocacy group, the merger was approved, and PVR-Inox became India’s largest exhibitor by nearly every metric: revenue, number of screens, and cities it was present in. 

With this kind of dominance, business should have been a breeze. But more than a year since the merger, PVR-Inox is struggling to grow. 

What’s wrong? 

Has PVR-Inox’s growth hit a wall?

On the face of it, PVR-Inox’s headline numbers for FY24 don’t look bad (pdf). Sales of movie tickets and food and drink are up 19% and 21% respectively. Income from ads, a key indicator of steady viewership, is also up 18% year-on-year. Admits increased by 8% to just over 151 million for the year, while occupancy rates remained steady at just over 25%. 

But these are weak numbers, given that 2023 was a historic year for box office collections, especially the first week of August when Jailer, Gadar 2, and Jawan brought a stampede to the theatres. For the quarter ended March 2024, the cinema chain’s occupancy rate was 22%, lower than the full year’s average. While revenue for the quarter grew more than 10%, the firm made a Rs 90 crore loss after tax and an anaemic Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation) margin of just 2.7%. 

Despite a historic year of box office collections and a merger to consolidate market leadership, PVR Inox hasn’t managed to get back on its original growth trajectory. 

“Yes, our operating margins are still trending below where we were pre-pandemic,” Nitin Sood, group chief financial officer of PVR-Inox, told analysts in an earnings call (pdf) last week. “Occupancies have [been] trending …lower than where we were pre-pandemic. Mix of supply side issues because we've not had all the languages firing together [sic].” In FY20, just before the pandemic hit, PVR’s occupancy rate was at 34.9% (pdf).

The pipes are dry

Some of these problems are not entirely in PVR-Inox’s control. Hit movies have come in bursts, leaving some quarters (such as the one ended March 2024) dry. Box office collections haven’t been consistent, especially for Hollywood films that do most of their India business with premium exhibitors such as PVR-Inox. 

As PVR-Inox’s collections plunged from a high of Rs 1,336.8 crore in the September quarter to Rs 759 crore in the March quarter, English films’ share in the earnings also fell from 20-30% in the first half of the year to just 6-10% in the second half. Hollywood strikes at the time cut off the supply of good quality films, especially those shown in IMAX, where tickets tend to be priced higher even in premium chains such as PVR-Inox.

Now, with Indians busy paying attention to the Lok Sabha elections and the Indian Premier League, there’s not much room for the movies. The June 2024 quarter is also likely to be a washout for PVR-Inox. 

But this isn’t a temporary problem. Exhibitors have been struggling to keep movies and people coming to cinemas for a while now (read more about it in this edition of The Impression). Recent big budget films such as Fighter and Bade Miyan Chote Miyan performed poorly at the box office, while ‘smaller’ films with lower budgets and no big stars such as Laapataa Ladies and 12th Fail have recouped their money, leaving exhibitors wondering what films they should show next. 

Instead, PVR-Inox is getting into a new business altogether.

Fewer screens, more food

Last week, it announced it was getting into the food courts business, setting up a 49:51 joint venture with fast food chain operator Devyani International (pdf).

“Devyani has been a good F&B partner to us, where they supply to us [all of] Pepsi[‘s] products,” PVR-Inox’s Sood said. “We've also had a partnership with them for Costa, where we have 76 or 78 stores already operational within premises. So that is independent of this JV… here, I think the focus is to roll out food courts in shopping malls all over the country, and we're in the process of building a long-term business plan...” 

Neither company has earmarked a set amount to invest in this JV. However, PVR-Inox has made it clear it wants to cut back on long-term investments. While it plans to open about 120 screens every year, the company is cutting down capital expenditure on them. PVR-Inox nearly doubled the cash it spent on investing activities in FY24 to Rs 1292.5 crore (pdf), while its free cash flow increased by about 18% to Rs 393 crore. 

“The idea is to use the free cash flows to look at adjacent businesses, which could potentially add value over a period of time,” Sood told analysts in the call quoted above. “And hence, food is a very large piece which we currently [earn from] in a post ticketed area. And this partnership to invest in the pre-ticketed F&B is one of such things that we are looking at.” 

Long-time patrons of Indian multiplexes have probably complained about the price of PVR popcorn at least once. In 2018, the government of Maharashtra promised to cap popcorn prices in the state but didn’t follow through. But for PVR-Inox, food has been a promising counterbalance when the movies don’t work. In the relatively drier March 2024 quarter, the company’s movie ticket sales grew just 6%, while sales of food and drink grew by 17% year on year. With the Devyani deal, PVR-Inox has the opportunity to earn from selling food to more visitors at a mall or shopping centre, not just to those coming to watch a movie. 

In FY24, the company shut down 85 ‘underperforming’ screens, mostly in malls and shopping centres that were nearing their end. This fiscal, it plans to close another 70 screens. PVR-Inox closed the year with 359 cinemas (not screens), the same number as last year. It is also being circumspect about opening new ones. Company executives told analysts they have “rejected a huge number of properties” and are picking only one out of every six proposals for a new cinema or screen coming their way, largely in south India. 

Besides, the company is keen on a new ‘FOCO’ (franchise owned, company operated) model, where a developer or an investor bears the cost of setting up a new screen while PVR-Inox operates it. It already runs 42 such screens.

Survival tactics

Other cinema chains in India are also trying to recover from ‘long Covid’, struggling to bring back movies and audiences to their screens. In FY23, PVR-Inox had posted an (accounting standards adjusted) loss after tax of Rs 212.22 crore. That same year, rival Cinepolis posted a loss of Rs 69.46 crore. Smaller regional rivals such as Miraj Cinemas made a Rs 25 crore loss after tax, while Rajhans Cinemas made a Rs 4.47 crore loss for the year (on revenue of about Rs 111 crore). 

Yet, smaller chains focused on non-metro cities are investing in long-term growth from screens, not food. Earlier this month, Rajhans announced that it will set up IMAX screens at its new theatre in Surat, Gujarat. Last month, IMAX tied up with Miraj Cinemas to open screens in Mumbai and Jaipur while promising to expand to smaller cities in north and central India (read more in this edition of The Impression). 

For chains like Rajhans and Miraj, there is an opportunity to sell a more premium experience to a non-metro affluent audience, given that their ticket prices tend to stay below Rs 200. However, PVR-Inox has been hiking ticket prices geared to a premium or even luxury experience since the pandemic. Pre-pandemic, the average ticket price at PVR was at Rs 204; in FY24, it was Rs 259. 

Where does PVR-Inox go from here?

Already, it has begun cutting ticket prices and offering new experiments such as PVR Passport. To cram in more screenings, it has been screening films ad-free in a few cinemas, although company executives say it is an early experiment that has not hit ad revenue just yet. All of this can only work if there is a steady supply of new films that can attract audiences, something PVR-Inox cannot control. Until then, there may be more money for now in being a popcorn-burger-cola seller than in the movie business.

Last Scroll Down📲

Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Personal touch: After a successful run in the ads business, Netflix will launch its own in-house ad tech platform by the end of next year. Its ad tier has 40 million monthly active users worldwide. 

Waiting: Zee Entertainment’s MD and CEO Punit Goenka told analysts in an earnings call that he expects the company’s shareholders to decide if he must be replaced. The company has brought in a turnaround expert to fix its post-merger mess. 

Toons not required: Disney’s animation arm Pixar, creator of Toy Story and Finding Nemo, is laying off 175 people or 14% of its workforce as it cuts down on streaming originals to focus on films instead. 

Pulp and prayer: Vibhu Agarwal, founder of the racy content streaming service Ullu, launched a new platform dedicated to Indian Hindu mythology called Hari Om; Ullu has filed papers for a public listing. 

Trumped: Former US President Donald Trump’s social media firm Trump Media reported poor quarterly results, its first since being listed. It made over $327 million in losses in the March 2024 quarter, up from just over $210,000 in losses a year ago.

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

Apart from their profession, what connects Scarlett Johansson and Jackie Shroff? They’re both actors. They’re also both part of a larger group of celebrities rushing to protect their voices, likenesses, and personalities from AI. 

Last year, Anil Kapoor successfully petitioned the courts last year for copyright protection to his signature phrase “jhakaas”. Already, actor Amitabh Bachchan had secured personality rights to his iconic voice and likeness the year before. Now, Kapoor’s contemporary, actor Jackie Shroff, also won protection for his voice, likeness, and phrases most associated with him, including “Jaggu dada” and “bhidu”. There were arguments, such as this column in The Indian Express, that said celebrities shouldn’t get to own entire words or phrases. 

Yet, since Bachchan’s win, Indian actors have been rushing to get legal rights to as broad a definition of their personality rights as possible. Johansson’s case demonstrates just how vulnerable famous people are to being misappropriated, not just by scammy, AI-generated social media channels, but by some of the world’s most valuable companies. 

This week, Johansson released this statement about finding out OpenAI may have illegally used a copy of her voice for their newest ChatGPT-4o system. OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman isn’t in a position to deny the charges; Johansson said he had reached out to her with a formal offer to voice the system, which she declined. Besides, Altman gave the game away when he tweeted ‘Her’, an apparent reference to the 2013 sci-fi movie about a man falling in love with an AI chatbot voiced by Johansson.

Johansson may sue. OpenAI is pausing ‘Sky’, one of ChatGPT-4o’s five voices. Hollywood’s actors’ union SAG-AFTRA has already helped introduce draft legislation to protect artists’ voices and likeness. Last year’s Hollywood strikes focused heavily on how AI may threaten actors’ jobs.  

Remember, several top OpenAI executives responsible for enforcing guardrails on the company’s work recently left. The question to ask is: even after all the legal protections available to actors, can they prevent anyone — impersonators, small advertisers, social media accounts, or even powerful corporations — from misusing their likeness? Perhaps Jaggu dada will have better luck than Samantha from Her.

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thecore.in with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, hit the button below to subscribe now—it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

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Most Hindi speakers have grown up watching an old man grinning toothily from the TV as a chorus of women sing “Asli masale sach sach!” (“Real masalas, it’s true!”). 

Many of them would also have learned to do yoga or pranayam from Baba Ramdev – the face of Patanjali Ayurved – on TV channels such as Aastha TV or Sanskaar TV. Legacy brands like MDH, Everest, and Patanjali have been advertising themselves for years (or decades) as the true face of Indian taste, health, and values. 

Turns out all that might just be a myth. 

Spices made by Everest and MDH were banned in Hong Kong and Singapore after their authorities found unacceptable amounts of ethylene oxide, a sterilisation agent known to cause cancer with long-term exposure. Patanjali’s founder Acharya Balkrishna and celebrity face Ramdev have been apologising profusely before the Supreme Court for contempt of court. The company also published how sorry they were in the papers twice, the second time after the court ordered them to make the apologies as large as their misleading ads were. 

Balkrishna and Ramdev are fighting allegations of defaming the Indian Medical Association, vaccines, and modern medicine while advertising Coronil, their purported cure for Covid-19, which has no evidence to back it up. 

While hearing this case last week, Supreme Court justices Himani Kohli and Ahsanuddin Amanullah observed that a brand and an endorser should be held equally responsible for airing a misleading or false advertisement. 

Now, MDH’s endorser is the (now deceased) founder of the brand, Dharampal Gulati, the kindly old man synonymous with its catchy jingle. Patanjali’s face is a TV yoga maverick who doesn’t legally own any stake in his own company. But hundreds of ads air everyday featuring actors, sports legends, and social media personalities. 

Those are just the standard ad films. Millions of more ads run as Facebook posts, YouTube video callouts, Instagram stories, and much more. All of this begs the question: how much can we (reasonably) hold a celebrity responsible for the brands they endorse?

Celebrity endorsements and the grey area of responsibility 

First: what does Indian law say about a celebrity’s legal responsibility before endorsing a product? 

According to the Consumer Protection Act, 2019 (pdf), India’s central consumer protection authority (CCPA) can fine an ‘endorser’ up to Rs 10 lakh (for the first offence) or up to Rs 50 lakh (for subsequent offences) or prohibit them for up to a year from publicly endorsing any other product. 

Three years later, the CCPA released an additional set of guidelines (pdf) for brands and those who endorse them on how to prevent misleading and false advertising. It has two important prescriptions for celebrities endorsing a product or service:

1. They must clearly disclose any conflict of interest or relationship with the brand that might “materially affect the value or credibility of the endorsement”
   

2. They must make the endorsement after actually using the product for an adequate period of time and express a “genuine, reasonably current opinion” of it 

In practice, however, this is not how most celebrity endorsements work. And given the way top or A-list celebrities manage their endorsements, it is probably not possible for them to strictly follow these guidelines. 

“Celebrities usually sign a contract with warranties in place ensuring that the brand has conducted all required tests, obtained all the necessary regulatory approvals and clearances, and is making only truthful, accurate claims,”  says Rachna Chandiramani, founder of advisory firm Thriverse, which helps brands crack celebrity partnerships. “Unless you are involved with a brand as a founder or investor, you are not likely to get involved in very specific details of processes like product development or certifications.” 

For instance, actress Deepika Padukone is the co-founder and celebrity face of skincare brand 82°E, while several other celebrities, including actors (Anushka Sharma, Shilpa Shetty, Katrina Kaif) and sports stars (Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Sachin Tendulkar) are investors in startup brands that they also endorse. Here, the expectation is that as co-owners of the brand, they are personally responsible for the claims it makes. 

That may not be the case for actors Amitabh Bachchan and Shahrukh Khan while endorsing masalas (both endorsed Everest) or cement (Bachchan once endorsed Binani, while Khan is the new face of UltraTech). 

Chandiramani explains that A-list celebrities are often involved with dozens of different brands across categories. “An Amitabh Bachchan or a Ranveer Singh or a Virat Kohli are endorsing anywhere between 35-45 different brands. Most of them will be legacy brands with pedigree, but at best the celebrity can do basic due diligence.” Most celebrities will run through the final ad with a fine-toothed comb, asking questions and insisting on changes if they worry about a claim or visual representation made in it. 

But the stars need not struggle. In March 2022, the Advertising Standards Council of India launched a service called ‘Endorser Due Diligence’. For Rs 75,000, a celebrity endorsing a brand can request a non-technical analysis of a brand’s advertisement (a technical one costs Rs 1,90,000) run by ASCI’s panel of experts, including doctors, nutritionists, and lawyers. A representative of ASCI told The Impression that it did not have immediately available data on how many users had availed the service since its launch. 

No biggie

One can argue that such detailed due diligence isn’t strictly necessary. After all, CCPA’s document from 2022 contains only guidelines, not legally enforceable rules. However, in its arguments in the Patanjali case last week, the Supreme Court alluded to the guidelines and observed that the country needed a transparent complaint system for consumers affected by misleading ads. 

CCPA’s prescriptions are not new. The ASCI has had guidelines for celebrity endorsements since 2017, CEO and Secretary-General Manisha Kapoor told The Impression. “ASCI’s August 2023 update expanded the definition of celebrities to include influencers with over five lakh followers or over Rs 40 lakh in annual income, ensuring relevance in the evolving advertising landscape,” she said in email responses to a questionnaire. 

Yet, without legal enforcement, what good are guidelines? Already, celebrities are overwrought with ad films, social media endorsements, startup investments, even public appearances in sponsored clothing and accessories (what other purpose do ‘airport looks’ serve?). One suggestion the CCPA made in December last year was to “name and shame” brands who repeatedly run misleading ads by publishing a list of such repeat offenders. 

Once again, ASCI has already been doing this for years by not just naming brands, but also (for social media campaigns) the influencers involved in the violation. ASCI hands this list over to the CCPA periodically, Kapoor said. “Those who are concerned about their reputation usually would respond well to requests for voluntary compliance or lists which are more persuasive rather than legal in nature.” 

How effective has this system been so far? There are 265 non-compliant advertisers listed on ASCI’s website for various violations of the organisation’s ad guidelines. The latest case, however, is from June 2022. The website also lists 581 non-compliant social media content creators whose brand endorsements on platforms like Instagram violate ASCI guidelines for influencer marketing. The latest case here is from December 2023, and the list was last updated on 27 February this year. 

Besides, the CCPA’s counsel told the Supreme Court last week that it had issued 153 notices for misleading ads between July 2020 and April 2024; only 58 were closed. 

No wonder the Supreme Court is annoyed. Perhaps the swiftest example of an errant advertiser being punished is the full-page apologies Patanjali was forced to run after the judges gave Ramdev and Balkrishna a piece of their minds. 

It is simply impossible for the Supreme Court to go after every individual offender who neither cares about the law and guidelines, nor is affected by being named and shamed on an industry body’s website. Given the changing nature of advertising to encompass ‘nano-influencers’ and fleeting social media content, it’s also not possible for regulators to keep track of every potentially misleading claim (or even campaign) or for celebrities and their teams to fact-check everything they set out to endorse. 

Where does this leave the credibility of a celebrity endorsement in the minds of consumers? There is plenty of wiggle room in the law and with regulators. Remember, food regulator FSSAI increased the acceptable limit for pesticide residue in spices tenfold as news of Singapore and Hong Kong’s ban on some MDH and Everest masalas rolled in. But if a celebrity can now only get a potential customer’s fleeting attention but not trust (or money), what good is the money spent on their pricey endorsements?

Last Scroll Down📲

Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Search for meaning: Google plans to include AI-generated summaries to search queries, significantly altering Google Search, its most lucrative line of business. 

Slow down: PVR-Inox is shutting down 70 screens and lowering capital expenditure for the year as it posted a Rs 130 crore loss, with operating revenue rising 10%. 

Goodbye: Aparna Purohit, head of Amazon Prime Video originals for India and southeast Asia, has resigned. She may join actor Aamir Khan’s production company. Purohit had joined Amazon in 2016. 

It’s raining bundles: Several streaming companies announced bundling partnerships this week: Warner Bros Discovery is teaming up with Disney in the US while Comcast is bringing Netflix, Peacock, and Apple TV+ together. 

Back home, Tata Play is offering Amazon Prime Video and allowing users to pick from the bundles they want. 

Free the press: The Supreme Court ordered the release of NewsClick founder Prabir Purkayastha, declaring his arrest and remand illegal. He was arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act.

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

A billboard, too big to be legal or stable to be safe, collapsed due to sudden rains in Mumbai this week, killing at least 14 people. This isn’t the only such billboard in the city. The Free Press Journal reports that Mumbai’s municipal authorities have asked managers of the city’s suburban railway systems to remove at least 99 such oversized billboards standing on the lands they own. 

How big is too big? Mumbai allows billboards measuring up to 40x40 feet within city limits. The one that collapsed was at least 120x120 feet. A post from April last year by real estate developer Ajmera Group labelled it ‘Asia’s largest hoarding’, citing a Guinness World Record. 

Big billboard owners and clients are routinely committing crimes in Mumbai, all for some extra views and money for ads. Last year, 41 trees reportedly died along the city’s Eastern Express Highway after being poisoned. An investigation is underway, and evidence suggests those involved killed the trees (rather than cut them illegally) so that they don’t obstruct the view of large billboards along the busy arterial road. 

Is the ad revenue worth this, and worth the lives of 14 people? 

Consider this: consulting firm EY estimates (pdf) that out-of-home advertising will be worth Rs 4,660 crore in 2024. The Maharashtra state government is offering Rs 5 lakh as compensation to the next of kin of each of the 14 victims. The total bill is Rs 70 lakh. Bhavesh Bhinde, the 51-year-old owner of the collapsed billboard, has reportedly been fined 21 times in the past for illegal outdoor banners and billboards. 

For lawmakers, municipal officials, and even billboard owners, the math seems to work out just fine. 

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thecore.in with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

If someone shared this newsletter with you or if you’ve found the online version, hit the button below to subscribe now—it’s free! You can unsubscribe anytime.

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Media baron Subhash Chandra and his son Punit Goenka, CEO of Zee Entertainment, are living out the same storyline as their counterparts Shari Redstone at Paramount and Bob Iger at Disney. All three are juggling the urgent need to cut deals, identify leadership, wean off cash from the legacy business, and invest in long-term digital growth, all while assuaging nervous shareholders. 

But the father-son duo have what Redstone and Iger don’t: the Forrest Gump of fixing Indian corporate messes.

The corporate troubleshooter leading Zee’s salvation 

Uttam Prakash Agarwal, 60, works out of an industrial estate located in Kandivali, a suburb in northwestern Mumbai. Employees and visitors of his chartered accountancy practice leave their shoes at the door. Part of the walls are lined with fat, leather-bound books on business, accounting, and Hindu scripture. The rest are adorned with awards, medals, and photographs of Agarwal with major political leaders—presidents, chief ministers, and prime ministers, both former and current. 

Agarwal has been associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 1988, where he first started as a treasurer of Ward 148 in Borivali, another northwestern Mumbai suburb. He has been a convenor of the Maharashtra Economic Cell of the BJP and a member of the party’s central finance committee. Yet the photos in his office have him with leaders across the ideological spectrum, from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to his predecessor Manmohan Singh, to former chief ministers Lalu Prasad Yadav and Uddhav Thackeray. 

His own ideological beliefs are rather straight and narrow, at least when it comes to business. 

“Whatever companies have been made and destroyed, there was always a promoter’s vision behind it,” Agarwal told The Impression. “For your information, no industrialist who sells his home to set up a company sleeps well at night. Show me an industrialist today who goes to sleep without pills. It is the CEO, the CFOs, and the credit rating agencies who sleep well. Creating employment is the government’s job, but the industrialist does it instead.” 

Agarwal is intimately familiar with the troubled Indian industrialist. 

As the former president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, he played a crucial role in the prosecution of Satyam auditors who were in charge when founder Ramalinga Raju cooked the company books. He was appointed an independent director on the boards of several troubled companies after its promoters faced financial trouble and/or criminal charges: Yes Bank, Reliance Capital, National Spot Exchange, and 3i Infotech. 

Sometime late last year, Agarwal says he got a call from Zee Entertainment’s company secretary. Would he, an expert manager of some of India’s biggest corporate governance mess-ups, be interested in helping out Zee Entertainment? “I am in the public domain. I have played an important role in Satyam, in NSEL [National Spot Exchange Limited]. People keep recommending my name [for independent director roles],” he says. 

By mid-January, Agarwal had been appointed as independent director. Soon enough, he asked for a number of internal panels to look into all of Zee’s troubles, including a cost-cutting committee and an internal investigations team headed by a former Allahabad High Court judge. 

Since its plans to merge with Sony fell through, Zee Entertainment has been in turmoil. ̛For two years, it was counting on the joint might of Zee and Sony’s TV broadcast, film, music, and digital businesses to turn things around. The Goenkas, with a mere 4% shareholding, are also struggling to regain shareholders’ trust. 

But the headline is grim. In the last five years, Zee Entertainment’s revenue from operations has grown just under 2% in total, while its net profit margin has dropped from 19% in FY19 to 3% in FY23, per its latest annual report (pdf). In the first three quarters of FY24, income from operations is up over 10% but net profit margin is down to 3.5% from 9% the year before (pdf). In 2024 so far, the company has lost more than half its market cap. 

Zee Entertainment declined to comment, citing the regulatory ‘silent period’ before it reports earnings for the March 2024 quarter and FY24. 

Rock and a Hard Place

Zee has set an aggressive profitability target for itself: Ebitda of 18% by FY26. Note: Zee’s Ebitda margin for the first nine months of FY24 was just shy of 11% (pdf). Delivering it is more likely to convince the markets that Goenka is the right man for the job. Two senior executives told The Impression the general belief in the firm is that there is no viable alternative for the top job, especially because a turnaround plan is already in motion with the blessings of the board. They spoke on the condition of anonymity. It all comes down to whether Zee can deliver on this promise. Most of it will come from deep cost cuts in the short-term. 

But the short-term promise comes at the cost of long-term growth. The world’s biggest media companies are busy weaning themselves off of their traditional cash cows — particularly TV — as they ramp up investments in digital and turn streaming profitable. Disney sold its TV channels in Asia (including Star India), Warner Bros. Discovery is struggling with anaemic TV ad revenue, and cable-heavy Paramount is struggling to find a buyer, all while Netflix, which has cracked long-term digital profits, clearly says it isn’t interested in buying TV.  

Last fiscal, Zee spent just over Rs 600 crore on a technology and innovation centre in Bengaluru, largely on top talent and R&D (research and development). It has now been gutted. “The centre was built to fix the core of Zee’s tech stack,” one of the two senior executives quoted above told The Impression. “The idea was to move from the inefficiencies of working with so many external vendors and build a strong technology core for the firm. Besides, Sony was about to come into Zee; the technology system was designed to manage a much bigger digital business.” 

Acquisitions like SugarBox, a startup that provides local WiFi, would help Zee strengthen key technology functions such as content delivery, which is especially important in live streaming. Eventually, Zee had hoped the tech centre could generate revenue on its own, selling its proprietary technology to other customers. 

In the last few years, no other major Indian broadcaster has invested this much money to set up a separate technology and investment centre in the manner of Zee. Some, such as Star India, bought stakes in tech startups in the 2010s. But there is greater urgency today to invest in good quality technology as traditional broadcasters move to streaming. Just last month, Warner Bros. Discovery introduced its own first-party data platform for marketers. Earlier this year, Disney launched an AI advertising tool called ‘Disney’s Magic Words’. 

Without a slate or a dedicated executive heading Zee5, growth from streaming isn’t an immediate priority either. Zee’s shareholders were expecting to be owners of a credible large media empire that can take on the Reliance-Star-Disney combine. Will they settle for a shrunken business relying on past growth engines, just for a bump in Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation)? 

“For your information, no industrialist who sells his home to set up a company sleeps well at night.”

Uttam Prakash Agarwal, Independent Director, Zee Entertaiment

Agarwal declined to comment on the goings-on within Zee Entertainment’s board, citing protocol, but he believes the company’s primary problem isn’t corporate governance. Subhash Chandra and his sons Punit and Amit are under investigation in various cases of financial irregularities, chiefly in allegations of misappropriation of Yes Bank deposits and investments in Shirpur Gold Refinery. 

At the heart of Yes Bank’s funds misappropriation case is a Letter of Comfort from September 2018, personally provided by Subhash Chandra, to adjust an outstanding loan worth Rs 200 crore for a fixed deposit that he later allegedly misappropriated. Incidentally, Agarwal’s path had already crossed with Zee’s future troubles, which he is now fixing. He was appointed to Yes Bank’s board of directors just two months later, in November 2018. 

“I haven’t seen any corporate governance issues in Zee in the last 3-4 months that I have been an independent director,” Agarwal says. “Also, I don’t foresee that a person like Subhash Chandra will make mistakes. He is a very sensible person and won’t do anything wrong.”

Yet, there are reports that Chandra has been taking crucial business decisions at the firm. One former senior executive told The Impression that he was attending board meetings and taking layoff decisions. They spoke on the condition of anonymity. 

Agarwal denies this. 

“Subhash Chandra has never attended a board meeting,” he says. “He has never interacted with any board member officially, never talked to us regarding any board meetings. I can give you this in writing in a board letter.” 

Yet, Agarwal says, Chandra has a right to advise the company informally. “As Chairman Emeritus, he is permitted to be in the office and to offer his advice as a veteran of the media business. We [the board] had just one meeting where we informally asked him about the business.” 

That is a bit of a grey area. India’s Companies Act does not recognise the position of Chairman Emeritus. “This is a tricky one. This is an honorary position, given to someone as a token of recognition,” an independent corporate governance expert told The Impression on condition of anonymity. “There are no legal specifications of what a company must and must not share with a person holding this position. Shareholders are asked for approval on their salaries, but not on the decision to appoint someone to this position. The risk with having a Chairperson Emeritus in company matters is that it muddies the waters with regard to chain of command. Yet, veteran business builders often have invaluable skills and contacts that a company will benefit from. As long as those skills are still relevant.” 

The question to ask the Zee Entertainment board and Subhash Chandra is whether he is involved in day-to-day operations, or simply asked for an opinion on strategic decisions. Agarwal maintains it is the latter. “But this can be difficult to do,” says the corporate governance expert quoted above. “We are on the outside looking in. Yet, to say that a company veteran should simply be put out to pasture and not allowed into the office isn’t right.”

The board is pushing full steam ahead on a cost-cutting exercise, with CEO Punit Goenka in charge willing to be guided on the best way forward, Agarwal says. 

Zee’s bleeding films business first prompted the board to take a hard look at the company’s costs, Agarwal told The Impression. “We [the board] were told that even in FY25, the films business will post a loss,” he said. “Only one or two films were making money for the company. Then why are we assigning all this manpower and Rs 300 crore when you will make losses even this fiscal? That is when we decided that we have to start showing a profit from somewhere.” 

In March, the company slashed its workforce by 50% in its Bengaluru tech and innovation centre. A week later, it cut 15% of all jobs across the company. Digital investments in the Bengaluru tech centre and Zee5 were given free reign and plenty of talent by Punit Goenka, the two senior executives quoted above told The Impression. “PG may not always have a clear idea of how, but he was always very clear about investing in future growth and gave executives the freedom to execute it,” one of the executives said.  

Besides, Zee has made sweeping changes in its top leadership, letting go of top executives including content head Punit Misra and revenue head Rahul Johri. Both executives were appointed to the senior roles in 2020 to spruce up Zee’s financial performance and make the company more process-driven, especially in subjective tasks such as commissioning and acquiring content, according to the senior executive quoted above. Another insider close to the company told The Impression that Punit Goenka handpicked Johri, formerly the CEO of the Board of Control for Cricket in India, to push Zee to higher profits. Misra and Johri handled content and revenue across all Zee verticals, something that the company was new to. 

Now, another member of the family — Amit Goenka — has taken charge of all content while executives managing revenue in the broadcast business are directly reporting to Punit Goenka. 

Zee is also holding off from making original content for its OTT platform Zee5, two industry executives aware of the development told The Impression on condition of anonymity. While competitors Netflix and Amazon Prime have unveiled vast slates of original films and shows in India for the year, Zee5 is only releasing what has already been made. Besides, Nimisha Pandey, Zee5’s head of Hindi originals, has quit the firm.

Sympathy Pains 

One would take such sweeping reorganisation and deep cost-cutting as a sign that the company had been careless with its past investments, both in content and in talent. 

Yet, Agarwal maintains, Zee’s promoters are being targeted unfairly. “An industrialist is not so intelligent,” Agarwal says. “He hires professionals to help him execute his vision. Why do they not object when they see something going wrong? It is their job to do so.” He cites the example of Yes Bank founder Rana Kapoor, who was jailed in 2020 for an alleged Rs 466.51 crore bank fraud, pointing out that no one in the management was ever accused of being complicit in the crime. 

“Rana Kapoor went to jail for four years. Yes, he made a mistake, but nothing different from what ordinary politicians and bureaucrats do. He gave jobs to 28,000 people. He used to call me up at 3 am on some nights to check if a decision he was about to make was appropriate, although I would remind him I’m merely an independent director.” 

Agarwal eventually quit Yes Bank’s board in January 2020, alleging corporate governance failure under Ravneet Gill, the banking professional who replaced Kapoor in early 2019. 

Clearly, the board and its prominent corporate governance clean-up man have reposed their faith in Subhash Chandra. That may not be enough to assuage shareholders. Remember, in January this year, key minority shareholders discussed calling an extraordinary general meeting to oust Goenka as Zee’s chief executive. Three years ago, key institutional investor Invesco had attempted something similar before exiting the company last year. 

For the people at the top, particularly turnaround specialist Uttamji, the priority is saving a hard-working industrialist’s homegrown media empire. 

“I was so happy when the merger [of Zee with Sony] did not happen,” Agarwal says. “I was happy that an Indian company was saved. If we don’t support them [Indian entrepreneurs], we will be sold off… foreign companies come and take away our talent, our resources. Netflix, Amazon, Sony are all foreign. What Indian company is left?”

Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the person who invited Uttam Prakash Agarwal to be an independent director at Zee Entertainment. It was the firm’s company secretary.

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Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

War cry: TikTok sued the US government for a recently passed law forcing its Chinese parent ByteDance to divest failing which the app may be banned in the US; TikTok says the law violates its users’ right to free speech. It has less than a year to comply. 

Too slow, not furious: The Election Commission ordered X (formerly Twitter) to take down an offensive video by the ruling BJP party’s Karnataka wing depicting Indian Muslims as usurpers of the rights of other Indian minorities. It came very late though; voting in Karnataka state has already concluded. 

Drawing the curtains: Low interest in big-budget Bollywood fare has prompted multiplexes to cut down the number of shows in a day and even shut some screens temporarily, The Economic Times reported. Why did this happen? Read more in this edition of The Impression. 

Another one: OpenAI is on a roll. This week, it signed another licensing deal with Dotdash Meredith, publisher of People magazine and Investopedia. OpenAI will bring all its content to ChatGPT. The publisher will use OpenAI’s models to develop new ad products.

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Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

The (im)balance of power is tipping a little more towards independent individual journalists. This week, veteran journalist Ravish Kumar said he had amassed 10 million subscribers on his YouTube channel. He joined the platform less than two years ago, but gained more momentum in the past year after he quit his longtime employer NDTV (an announcement of his resignation is still Kumar’s most watched YouTube video). 

Meanwhile, Kumar’s non-journalist counterpart Dhruv Rathee has added more than two million subscribers in just about a month. His last five videos have more than 60 million views at the time of writing this. These videos are focused on attacking the ruling party via issues such as electoral bonds and right-wing propaganda via WhatsApp. He’s even launched a WhatsApp channel with clips from his videos, designed to be easily forwarded to groups of family and friends.

Much of Rathee’s and Kumar’s appeal comes from covering news and views that long disappeared from traditional news channels. Sample this: PM Narendra Modi’s exclusive interview with Times Now editor Navika Kumar had a little more than 860,000 views in one day, while Ravish Kumar’s two-day old video documenting the rise of student leader and Congress Lok Sabha candidate Kanhaiya Kumar already has over 2.7 million views. 

To be sure, more views on a certain video does not mean viewers agree with the arguments made by a creator. What it does show is that there is an audience for alternatives to the largely government-aligned content broadcast by India’s biggest legacy news channels. On YouTube, the competition between legacy media and independent creators is open for all to measure. But on TV, news channels have a convenient black box to hide in. Remember, TV measurement industry body BARC stopped releasing viewership data for news channels for 17 months after some executives were caught manipulating ratings in favour of Republic TV. 

With these early signs of YouTube success, will we see more ‘star’ reporters and creators ditch full-time employment to start their own channels? 

Forget reporters, even legacy media owners seem to be pissed off at the virtual gag orders under which they are operating. Even Subhash Chandra, himself a former BJP MP in the Rajya Sabha, complained about press freedom in an interview to his Zee News channel. On World Press Freedom Day.

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thecore.in with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

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Last year was JioCinema’s first time streaming the IPL. What better way to capitalise on the massive audience you’ve just acquired than to flood it with free entertainment? In 2023, JioCinema kept IPL viewers hooked by releasing a new film or web series episodes every Friday, starting with Shahid Kapoor’s film Bloody Daddy in June. It even ran the ad campaign, ‘Dekhta Ja India’ (Keep watching, India). 

This year, JioCinema is asking its viewers who came for the IPL to pay for the rest, just a little bit. New subscription plans, announced last Thursday, price all of JioCinema’s premium and mass content at just about a rupee a day (for the first month, then ₹2 a day or ₹59/month). That’s a tenth of the price of Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, and still about 20% of the basic plans offered by its local counterparts Zee5 and SonyLIV. 

It feels an awful lot like 2016. 

Back then, Jio’s rock bottom prices for mobile data ushered a new internet age in India. But it is now impossible for the telecom industry to make good money from selling data alone. 

Cut to today…

Will JioCinema kill OTT subscriptions? 

As JioCinema rolled out its new prices last Thursday, Viacom18’s Kiran Mani was at a conference in Mumbai laying out plans for how JioCinema will earn from both advertisers and subscribers. Mani is Viacom18’s CEO for digital business. 

“I don’t believe there is anything called free,” Mani told attendees at the conference, hosted by the Asia Video Industry Association (AVIA), an entertainment industry body. “There is a price to everything. From a consumer perspective, what we are grateful for is that they give us their time and permission to show them ads.” 

Yet this year, JioCinema has placed an extremely low paywall of nearly ₹1 a day on all its original content apart from the IPL. This includes premium libraries of HBO, Peacock, and NBCUniversal, bringing its content offerings at par with (or exceeding) those of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Besides, JioCinema has nearly stopped commissioning originals for the platform; Mani alluded to this by emphasising that the platform was keen on “doing more with content.” 

Critics of Jio’s ultra-low prices for cellular data labelled the company’s data plans as ‘predatory’. In 2016, when Jio first launched, data prices in India fell 48% while the time Indians spent online skyrocketed. Jio’s pricing forced its rivals Vodafone and Idea to merge; the combined telco Vi is just about surviving. Even until last year, the telecom regulator was fielding complaints of Jio’s ultra-low pricing for its other offerings, including broadband and cable TV channels. 

Will India’s still-nascent OTT industry face a similar fate? 

One answer comes from the way Reliance thinks about subscription video-on-demand or the SVOD business model in streaming. 

“There are two kinds of subscription platforms in India,” Mani said last week. “One is: I [the platform] have paid an ‘x’ amount for content and hence I want you [the subscriber] to pay me a certain amount for it. And I am hoping this content is suitable [for all kinds of users].” 

But what about those users who are unwilling to pay because all the content in a platform’s library doesn’t interest them? “Entertainment suits a certain kind of genre that says don’t interrupt me while I’m viewing it, and that’s where our pricing strategy for the consumer comes in. We don’t see this as free and paid, we see it as permissions granted by our customers.” 

For now, JioCinema considers its ultra-low subscription prices as a substitute for ads rather than a sustainable income stream that can cover the cost of the content it shows. Instead, Mani says, the platform wants to be a “daily habit” for its users. The money may come in from the users paying ₹29-59 a month, or (more likely) it will come in from a larger, more diverse pool of advertisers, ideally like the scale of ad customers Meta and Google now have in India. 

“You [the OTT platform] tend to obsess over the fact that I have these ten pieces of premium content and then you try to build a content-based platform,” he said. That locks a platform into getting a customer’s attention (and money) only when it has content they are willing to watch at that time. I need to get permission from the user that I become their daily habit[sic]… As we get more permissions, we will move from a streaming platform to a daily viewing platform to next year, a superior advertiser platform too.” 

Content Landfill 

JioCinema isn’t the first to offer subscriptions at super-low prices. Five years ago, Hotstar debuted a ‘VIP’ pack at ₹365/year. But this subscription came without Hotstar’s premium library from HBO, National Geographic, and others while JioCinema has thrown everything into the mix. 

“When you receive something like this for so cheap, you fail to see its first true value and the real cost that went into making it,” a senior OTT executive told The Impression on condition of anonymity. “When it is put behind a paywall, you will just say you can’t pay for it anymore.” 

Platforms in India are cutting their budgets for both originals and acquisitions, leaving unsold inventory (films and TV shows) to pile up with production houses. JioCinema’s lone upcoming original series, called Ranneeti: Balakot & Beyond, has been ready for release for over a year, two OTT industry executives told The Impression on condition of anonymity. 

JioCinema’s call to think less about content and more about being a ‘daily habit’ will only make content creators’ money problems worse. Soon, Reliance will own two major TV broadcasters (Star and Viacom) and three major film studios (Viacom, Jio Studios, Fox Star) along with Hotstar’s libraries and Disney’s unlimited original programming. It does not need to commission more content to broaden its offerings, nor can it recover the cost of any quality new programming with its current subscription gameplan. 

“We’ve run the gamut of paying too much and also too little,” the OTT executive quoted above told The Impression. “The people who make content are getting undercut in every way possible, told to prioritise quantity over quality. As an industry, we will have a moment of reckoning and it will come sooner rather than later. But unlike the waste from fast fashion, content is not lying in a landfill in Somalia destroying the environment. So, we don’t feel the impact of our decisions yet.”

Last Scroll Down📲

Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Mission Paramount: Bob Bakish, CEO of iconic Hollywood studio Paramount, quit amidst a possible merger with smaller rival Skydance Media. Paramount also hosted a strange, short earnings call announcing that three executives will handle the CEO’s office, ending it all by blasting the theme song of Mission Impossible, a Paramount title. 

No publicity: Layoffs are hitting more kinds of media businesses; advertising giant Omnicom-owned PR firm Ketchum Sampark is laying off 40 people in India and China while remaining employees and Ketchum’s clients are being moved to sister firm FleishmanHillard. 

No news: Four unknown people allegedly broke into a Mumbai journalist Neha Purav’s home last week and threatened her; she had reported that local koli (fisherfolk) women were insulted when Mumbai electoral candidate Piyush Goyal complained about the smell of fish in the local fish markets. 

Win and lose: Financial Times is the latest publisher to licence its content to OpenAI. Both companies will also jointly develop new AI products. Meanwhile, following The New York Times, a number of regional US newspapers owned by investment firm Alden Global have sued OpenAI for copyright infringement.

(Don’t) skip ad: Amazon made $11.82 billion in ad revenue in the March 2024 quarter, up 24% year on year. Meanwhile, Meta reported a 27% increase in revenue for Q1, its fastest quarterly growth since 2021 and revenue for Google’s parent Alphabet rose 15%, fastest since 2022. 

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

A brand must think several times before it runs ads featuring children. In this case, Bombay Shaving Company’s sub-brand Bombae didn’t explicitly feature Prachi Nigam, this year’s Class 10 topper of the Uttar Pradesh Board Examinations. But the copy of this full page advertisement (in the newspapers no less) has enough to imply that the brand is talking about Nigam and the unforgivable comments on her appearance that went viral when she was featured in the news for her achievement. 

It’s not clear how piggybacking on Nigam’s appearance is a good way for a personal care company to sell razors to women. Most responses to founder CEO Shantanu Deshpande’s LinkedIn post are critical, pointing out that the ad only extended Nigam’s ordeal instead of offering her solidarity from sexist, appearance-obsessed fools. Besides, does the ad even do what it is supposed to—tell people what it sells, and why? 

Maybe those involved at the Bombay Shaving Company could benefit from watching Nigam’s interview with the BBC. In one heartbreaking moment, she wonders if life would have been easier for her had she scored less on her exams and not been a Board topper in the public eye.

Or perhaps teams looking for their next ‘moment marketing’ plank should carefully study this ad by FIITJEE: the coaching centre ran newspaper advertisements featuring a young student who left for a rival chain, claiming she scored lesser than their students did on the IIT entrance exam because she left the centre to join an “evil” rival. 

It’s unclear if FIITJEE or Bombay Shaving Company had permission from either child to use them in their advertising, much less in such a disparaging way. But then, a child from a small town like Sitapur, Uttar Pradesh, is perhaps an easy target. How likely are her parents to sue a big brand backed by big names for violating her privacy, all for some advertising?

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thecore.in with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

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On to today’s story. We’re discussing billboards. 

The next time you leave your cab or the metro/rail station, head to your office lift, and look at the window while at your desk, count the number of bright (digital) billboards flashing ads at you. Chances are you saw several on the way home too, maybe even in the lift of your gated apartment complex. 

Yes, advertising is dominated by technology companies (aka the Google-Meta duopoly) while television, the former ad king, steadily declines. Yet, the shift of power to tech companies hasn’t completely killed legacy advertising yet. In previous editions of The Impression, we’ve discussed the resurgence of Indian radio companies (read more here) and the resurgence of local advertisers in cinemas (read more here). 

Another traditional advertising medium is looking ripe for recovery: outdoor ads. 

Why retailers need new ad networks

In 2022, food delivery firm Zomato made two investments in one go (pdf). One was software company UrbanPiper, which helps restaurants manage their online orders from across food ordering platforms. The other, more interesting bet was on advertising firm AdOnMo. 

The Hyderabad-based company, founded in 2016, is a relatively new entrant in the very old business of outdoor advertising. Its competitors include The Times Group’s billboards business (founded in 2005) and Selvel Media (founded in the 1940s). 

AdOnMo runs a network of ‘screens’ or digital billboards, the kind found on top of taxis, in office lift lobbies, and inside malls. Just like any other billboard company, the firm helps real estate owners install screens for ads and brings them advertisers interested in the space. For instance, in 2022, it signed a contract with Schindler to manage a network of screens in and around lifts operated by the elevator maker-operator in India. 

Zomato led AdOnMo’s Series A funding round in 2022, becoming its largest non-promoter shareholder with just over 17% stake in the company. Zomato invested more than Rs 112 crore for its stake, per its FY22 annual report (pdf). 

Three weeks ago, its bet was validated: AdOnMo raised nearly Rs 58 crore in a Series B from individual investors along with Qatar Insurance Company and Z Nation Lab.

The billboards business is a fraction of the Indian advertising market. Yet in 2022, it was worth Rs 3,690 crore, according to a report by consulting firm EY (pdf). A year later, it was up more than 12% to cross Rs 4,100 crore in revenue. More importantly, digital advertising is now about 9% of the total billboards advertising revenue. Digital out-of-home advertising, also called DOOH, relies on screens rather than plain vanilla hoardings to play ads that target people seeing the ad better and measure their attention more accurately. In India, these screens grew 67% to 150,000 nationwide, largely in gated residential communities and shopping complexes and malls in metro cities. 

That is where the big opportunity for Indian retail media really lies.

Searching for eyeballs

Retail advertising—aka ads on shopping apps—is one category that is eating into the duopoly that Google and Meta enjoy over India’s advertising business. Flipkart, Swiggy, Zomato, Nykaa, Zepto, and other e-commerce (and quick commerce) companies are racing to offer ad inventory to brands. None of the Indian retailers have been able to build a self-serve platform to rival Google’s and Meta’s in India so far, leaving the leadership position clear for Amazon. 

Yet, ad income is crucial for e-commerce companies because, with little upfront investment required, their ad earnings go straight to the bottomline. Food delivery companies, for instance, are now earning about 10-12% of their revenue from advertising. Besides, as Zomato and Amazon increase their platform fees and commissions, they are running out of new levers of revenue growth. Advertising is that high margin lever that can boost revenue and generate new business. 

However, food delivery and quick commerce companies are far more hyperlocal than Amazon. It makes sense for a company like Zomato to want a stake in not just national-level digital advertising but more targeted, localised ad networks such as billboards. Besides, billboards tend to be favoured by other hyperlocal businesses such as restaurants and local retailers, creating a clear fit for a company in the business of delivering goods neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood.

Digital billboards aren’t just a means of advertising on their own. Brands reuse billboard campaigns for online advertising campaigns. Consider the number of viral posts featuring advertisements from New York City’s Times Square, or frequent social media references to ‘banter’ between brands via billboards (such as this recent one between Boldcare and Zepto). 

Yet, no major Indian retailer, except Zomato, has invested directly in the outdoor advertising business. 

“The challenge with ad networks, especially digital out-of-home advertising, is the problem of scale,” Kabir Kochhar, founder of media-focused fund Audacity VC, told The Impression. “If I’m a P&G or an HUL, I will want exposure across, say, the top eight cities of the country. DOOH needs a lot of capital expenditure to achieve scale.”

The majority of Indian billboards businesses continue to be independent family-owned ventures or run by large news and media conglomerates such as The Times Group and Jagran Prakashan.

Since the pandemic, these businesses are scaling up rapidly. Take market leader Times Group’s billboard business, housed in Times Innovative Media Ltd. In FY21, a pandemic year, the company made Rs 186.8 crore in revenue from operations with a slim net profit margin of just over Rs 1 crore. The next year, the company slipped into losses, although revenue from operations doubled. In FY23, the company doubled its revenue from operations again, along with nearly Rs 49 crore in net profit. 

Retailers in the US have understood how important it is to not just build their own ads network but also buy into someone else’s. In February this year, the US’ biggest retailer, Walmart, acquired smart TV maker Vizio for $2.3 billion. The deal’s value to Walmart isn’t in the sale of Vizio TVs but in the ads network that runs on these connected TVs. Walmart earned $3.4 billion globally from its ads business (pdf), up 28% year-on-year. In the December 2023 quarter alone, Walmart’s international advertising business (which includes Flipkart) grew 76% year-on-year. 

Connected TVs are still growing in India, led by manufacturers such as Samsung that have displaced Amazon’s Fire Stick business, but India still has only 35 million connected TVs in the country, per the EY report quoted above. 

Connected, digital billboards also offer a network for retailers to tap into. Two years after its investment, Zomato still holds the first mover advantage. 

But, while e-commerce companies and retailers need advertising revenue to keep the cash registers ringing, they also need smart strategic investments to effectively make money from what is not their core business. 

“It is highly complex to run an ad network,” Audacity’s Kochhar says. “It has taken companies like Flipkart nearly a decade to build their ads network and still, Amazon is the shining beacon in this business.”

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Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Cookie’s safe: Google has delayed phasing out third-party cookies from its Chrome browser yet again, this time to early-2025. Google failed to secure approval from the UK’s privacy regulator which criticised its replacement ‘Privacy Sandbox’ and other measures to reduce tracking its users as insufficient. The original deadline for killing cookies was 2022. Advertisers are still planning their switch to first-party data. 

Good bad numbers: Netflix gained a record 9.3 million subscribers worldwide in the March 2024 quarter as revenue grew 14% and profits were up nearly 80% to $2.3 billion (pdf). But, the platform will no longer report its subscriber numbers starting next year.

Meanwhile, Spotify shares surged as the platform swung back to profits and active users grew 19%, led by a hike in subscription prices. 

New(s) pivot: News aggregator platform DailyHunt acquired magazine subscriptions aggregator Magzter for an undisclosed amount last week. Meanwhile, rival InShorts is reportedly pivoting from news aggregation to platform top influencers handpicked from LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. 

AI boost: Election season is all about maximising reach across national divides. AI is helping. YouTuber Dhruv Rathee and news anchor Ravish Kumar, now also on YouTube, are using AI tools to translate their videos on the ongoing elections into multiple Indian languages. 

Out the door: The US Senate passed a bill that will ban social media platform TikTok in the country if its Chinese parent ByteDance does not sell the company within a year. The bill now needs the US President’s approval. TikTok is also facing an inquiry in the EU over its ‘addictive’ features.

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

How much can one apologise for past mistakes? In the opinion of the Supreme Court, it should at least be as large as the mistake, literally. This week, Baba Ramdev and Acharya Balkrishna’s Patanjali Ayurved ran (tiny) advertisements in newspapers apologising for holding a press conference to address allegations of misleading advertising against them even as the case was being heard in the Supreme Court. 

Baba Ramdev is not legally an owner of Patanjali Ayurved but is the face of the firm; he apologised in person two weeks ago in an ongoing case of contempt of court, filed because the company continued to publish misleading ads for its products despite promising in court not to do so in November last year. 

But the in-person apology and newspaper clippings don’t seem to be enough. Yesterday, the Supreme Court asked why the company’s apology ads are only a fraction of the size of its misleading ads for products such as Coronil, a purported cure for Covid-19. The Court now wants to see copies of all the apology ads the company has run by the end of this month. It also added the Indian Medical Association and the Ministry of I&B to the case, adding that the court will pursue other instances of misleading ads by FMCG companies. 

Will this turn into a longer, Supreme Court-led clean up drive? It’s already been a terrible few weeks for Indian FMCG firms and their tall claims. Some spices made by MDH had so much pesticide in them that they’re banned in Singapore and Hong Kong (whatever happened to “asli masale sach sach”?). Nestle is being investigated for adding sugar to its baby food brand Cerelac in India for years, something it doesn’t do in the West. And the government told Bournvita and other malt food drink brands that they cannot call themselves health drinks anymore. What does this mean for us, who grew up being told one glass a day will make us “taller, stronger, sharper”? 

Perhaps the newspapers will soon be awash with apology ads. A big one from Patanjali already debuted just this morning.

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thesignal.co with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

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Now for this week’s story. 

IMAX digs its heels in India 

If you’re buying weekend tickets to an IMAX screening of the latest release, you’re probably spending upwards of ₹2,000 for a family of four. That’s not counting the popcorn and drinks, maybe a dinner afterwards near the theatre. 

One would imagine IMAX to be a phenomenon limited to the affluent, with demand coming largely from customers of PVR-Inox’s luxury-tier pricing. Besides, ever since the pandemic ended, cinemas have been fighting to bring audiences back to this big screen. Higher ticket prices have driven multiplex revenues much more than higher footfalls or the sale of more tickets. 

Yet, IMAX Corp had a record 2023 in India, earning $23.1 million at the box office last year. IMAX has been ramping up its ambitions in India but remained a marginal presence here for years (read more in this edition of The Impression). 

Now, it is keen on taking its larger-than-life screens to the masses. 

Last week, IMAX announced a partnership with Miraj Cinemas, a mid-priced multiplex chain best known for serving cities and neighbourhoods bereft of glitzy exhibitors such as PVR-Inox. 

This is an unusual partnership. So far, IMAX has opened screens in India largely with the country’s largest multiplex chain PVR-Inox, including at iconic single-screen locations such as Priya in Delhi and Eros in Mumbai. Last year, it came to Coimbatore with Broadway Cinemas, a new exhibitor. 

With Miraj, IMAX’s first aim is to restart another iconic location: Mumbai’s Wadala.

“The new Miraj IMAX location in Mumbai will take over the site of the former IMAX Wadala, the first-ever IMAX location in India that closed in 2023, re-establishing access for audiences in Mumbai to this iconic location that has been a centrepiece of the moviegoing experience in India since it opened in 2003,” Preetham Daniel, Vice President, theatre development at IMAX (APAC), told The Impression.

Besides reviving an old classic, IMAX finally wants to find its audience outside India’s biggest metros. That’s where Miraj Cinemas comes in. 

“The second location with Miraj will be based in Jaipur, a high-potential Tier II city, and will be located in one of the highest-grossing multiplex locations there,” Daniel added. 

Miraj Cinemas is best known for its mid-priced multiplexes, attractive to those who don’t want to spend on a premium multiplex ticket but would rather not sit in a single screen theatre either. “We have always been the value format of the country,” Amit Sharma, MD of Miraj Entertainment, told The Impression. “We are not St Regis [hotel], but we are the Courtyard Marriott [hotel].” Miraj’s network of multiplexes is spread over smaller cities in western and southern India such as Karwar (Karnataka) and Nandurbar (Maharashtra). In Mumbai, most of its cinemas serve the city’s satellite towns and far away suburbs such as Panvel, Dombivali, and Vasai-Virar.

Bumping up value

Miraj operates Entertainment Paradise, positioned as a luxury multiplex in the southern part of Jaipur. PVR opened a multiplex in the city last year, yet IMAX picked Miraj to expand to the city. Similarly, PVR was already present in Coimbatore when it took over local multiplex chain SPI Cinemas in 2018; yet, IMAX picked Broadway to launch in the city (note: last year, it also launched IMAX in Lucknow with PVR). 

Now, Miraj will help take IMAX to more of small-town India. 

“The terms of our recent deal with Miraj are for three new IMAX locations across the country. We are still in active discussion on where the third location will be,” IMAX’s Daniel said. 

Miraj’s Sharma says the market is ripe for IMAX in cities such as Ranchi and Raipur or those similar in size and consumer profile to Lucknow and Jaipur. But, he adds, a new IMAX market still needs to be a city with a population of more than two million. “Maybe five years down the line we can talk about towns with a one million population,” he says. 

That indicates the current limits to IMAX’s ambitions for going deeper in India. Tickets to an IMAX show of a film can cost more than double the price of a regular multiplex ticket. Miraj Cinemas is a value format, but its prices are not necessarily lower in smaller cities. “In the Miraj in [Mumbai suburb] Goregaon, we charge an average ticket price [ATP] of ₹200, but in Jodhpur, our ATP is higher, at ₹250,” Sharma said. 

Cinemas are still struggling to pull audiences consistently from widely available online entertainment. IMAX tickets can lure a premium audience but to make their small-town foray successful, they will need a steady stream of audiences willing to pay a premium on the already premium experience of a multiplex. 

Then, there is the challenge of content. 

Building the IMAX menu 

Is there enough content for the screens IMAX wants to open in the country? Already, multiplexes are struggling with a lull between a few big budget films (read more in this edition of The Impression). IMAX is now working with filmmakers to release more local language films in the format and last year had an unusually large slate, including the year’s biggest hits such as Jawan and Pathaan. Yet this year, so far, only four films were released in the format, of which Fighter and Bade Miyan Chote Miyan performed below expectations. 

Besides, IMAX is yet to introduce a ‘Filmed for IMAX’ movie in India, a programme under which filmmakers plan a project for the format and shoot it using IMAX-certified cameras. That’s because, as Daniel said earlier, the company plans to first add more screens before it convinces filmmakers to let IMAX executives have a greater say in how they make films for the format.

So far, all Indian IMAX releases have been converted into the format post-production. 

Yet, IMAX says it is confident that Indians will queue up for its offerings. “Three of the top ten highest grossing films for IMAX in India are Indian language titles that have been released since the start of 2022,” Daniel said. “Zooming out even further, nine of the top thirty highest-grossing IMAX films ever in India are Indian language titles.”

Unfortunately, exhibitors and technology firms like IMAX are dealing with a chicken-and-egg problem. What should come first, more screens in small cities or more films that will appeal to the people there? Therein lies the gamble that IMAX is taking on India.

Last Scroll Down📲

Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Succession: No, not the HBO show, although it was loosely based on the lives of the Murdochs, who ran Disney. But this report by The Financial Times lays out the four contenders for CEO Bob Iger’s job, now that the company has staved off a takeover bid by activist investor Nelson Peltz. Favourites include Disney Entertainment co-chairs, the head of theme parks, and the leader of ESPN’s sports division. We’ll have a name by 2026, when Iger’s contract runs out. 

Muzzled: Elections are almost here, and so is the media crackdown. X (formerly Twitter) released this statement saying it was forced to withhold posts made by parties, candidates, and elected leaders for the duration of the election. Meanwhile, the Press Club of India issued this statement condemning the government for ordering YouTube to block two Hindi news channels. 

Can’t shake it off: Much like most of the music industry in the US, Taylor Swift is fighting TikTok for higher royalties to her music. Yet, The Wall Street Journal reports the singer will promote her latest album, Tortured Poets Department, on TikTok and has been bringing her older hits back to the platform. Strike one for her label Universal Music; it’s been in a TikTok standoff for months. 

Let’s play outdoors: Gaming firm Nazara Technologies is part of a consortium bidding for bankrupt arcade games operator Smaaash, The Economic Times reported. Smaaash, backed by cricketer Sachin Tendulkar, shut down during the pandemic and was later taken over by creditors after founder Shripal Morakhia was accused of siphoning off the company’s assets. Earlier this year, Nazara’s subsidiary Nodwin Gaming bought the pop culture events organiser Comic Con India. 

Small may be back: Mid-budget films such as Crew, Shaitaan, and Madgaon Express have performed better at the box office than their glitzy action counterparts, indicating that Hindi film audiences are willing to spend on Regular Joe entertainment. Yet, Hollywood executives find that sequels and familiar stars are still bringing in more money than fresh faces and stories.

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

In the past year, we’ve talked a lot about the various ways in which media companies are trying to monetise audio. Here’s the latest attempt: Silicon Valley savant Naval Ravikant’s AirChat, an unholy cross between Twitter and Clubhouse. Just like Twitter’s, Airchat’s feed is full of small snippets of text. But these are transcripts of short voice notes, the primary mode of communication on the platform (somewhat like Clubhouse, which runs on audio-only chat rooms). Bottomline: you can’t type in Airchat. 

Airchat did the rounds among startup circles in India last week with the old, familiar strategy—by making it invite-only, prompting tech bros and their followers to ask for (and offer) invites on Twitter. 

Early reviews are encouraging (although Wired has reservations) but Airchat’s virality is reminiscent of Clubhouse’s rapid ascent and equally rapid descent sometime last year, much before questions of monetisation could even be properly discussed. 

The bigger problem is that no social media app has grabbed people’s imagination since TikTok in the last decade. Most recent attempts have either withered (such as Clubhouse or homegrown app Sharechat), are struggling (such as French Gen-Z app BeReal) or been acquired (such as teen-focused anonymous app Gas). 

If Ravikant and his co-founders are serious about building a sustainable social media business, this may not be a great prognosis. Merely incorporating AI and audio in an app is no longer a differentiator.

At least Airchat isn’t Marissa Mayer’s Sunshine. The app’s offering (photo-sharing) does not really address a pressing need; besides, its interface is straight out of the MySpace era. 

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thesignal.co with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

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On to today’s story. 

In the 2010s, trendy, social media-fuelled, millennial-focused brands like BuzzFeed, Vox Media, Huffington Post, and Vice were taking over, raising hundreds of millions of dollars at several billion dollar valuations. 

The party is over. BuzzFeed is a penny stock. Vox Media is getting further from its dream of going public. And Vice Media is bankrupt. Others are eking out an existence by laying off employees every year. 

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, at least not in India, with our massive consumer economy running on cheap internet and a young population. When Vice launched in India in 2016, it was planning a TV channel and had partnered with Times Internet. 

Today, Vice India is practically shut. 

What went wrong? And what lessons does Vice India’s story hold for foreign media companies betting on the country?

Inside the demise of Vice India

A counter-culture child of the 1990s, Vice didn’t make waves internationally until the 2010s. Its ‘edgy’ reporting on culture, music, politics, and sexuality inspired millennials around the world who were losing interest in traditional news. Vice wasn’t just a place to read about obscure sexual kinks or underground music scenes. It won a long list of news and entertainment awards including news documentary Emmys, a Peabody, a Pulitzer, and several advertising accolades. 

Naturally, when Vice launched in India, journalists here were thrilled.

“Like any other young journalist in New Delhi, I was tracking Vice’s launch in India,” a former Vice India employee told The Impression, requesting anonymity as they did not want to jeopardise relationships with their former employers. “I saw a young and edgy team of journalists running the newsroom in 2016-17. They were doing stuff you didn’t see in independent—let alone mainstream—Indian media yet… I was really jaded after spending 5-6 years in the traditional print media industry. Vice gave me a lot of hope.”

Two other former employees said their fascination with Vice began long before the company launched operations in India. “I was a fan of Vice even in college and graduate school,” another former employee told The Impression, also on condition of anonymity. “I always thought that if Vice launched in India, I would at least apply. You didn’t have to be a certain somebody to be a journalist at Vice, like you did in BBC, or NDTV, or The Indian Express.”

But trouble plagued Vice India right from the beginning, especially its editorial department. In 2018, several top editors resigned amid clashes over stories that could upset the government or invite “a phone call from Amit Shah”, Newslaundry reported. In mid-2018, Vice shut its Delhi office and moved all operations to Mumbai.  Editorial staffers were asked to step away from news and focus on ‘magazine-like’ features instead. 

“This was just the beginning of how things were during my time in Vice: things would be vague, and teams and projects would be shut down at any time,” the first former employee quoted above said. 

Vice Media did not respond to an email seeking comments. 

Vice’s joint venture with Times Internet also fell apart in just over a year after it was announced. Without the partnership, Vice no longer had access to a highly-regulated Indian TV licence. Chanpreet Arora, formerly a senior sales executive at Times Internet, had been appointed CEO of Vice India in 2017. In 2019, she left the company and was never replaced. 

That year, Vice India began the first of its series of brutal layoffs that became routine, right up to early 2024. Some employees jokingly referred to the 2019 job cuts as ‘The Red Wedding’, a reference to the iconic Game Of Thrones episode where several main characters were murdered. 

“People were sent an email the evening before where they were told to come to the office,” the first former employee told The Impression. “The next day, almost the entire editorial team, including the editor-in-chief Rituparna Som, was laid off. The management cited 'restructuring' in the company.” 

Vice’s then-CEO Hosi Simon had flown to India from the US to conduct the layoffs along with Samira Kanwar, then-Vice President for content at Vice Asia-Pacific (APAC). 

Company filings show that in June 2020, the India unit formally changed its name from Juventud Digital Media Pvt Ltd to Vice Media (India) Private Limited in an extraordinary general meeting. Vice India was now part of Vice APAC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of a foreign parent firm. 

Instead of an India newsroom, Vice decided to run a cross-border ship under the auspices of Vice APAC. The company launched a new division called Vice World News, which would bring together reporters from across Vice’s international offices to report on stories for the website. Vice World News appointed Filipino journalist Natashya Gutierrez as editor-in-chief for Asia Pacific. The Indian editorial team reported to her. 

Then the legal notices came.

A matter of FDI

In 2021, Vice India received multiple legal notices from India’s Ministry of Information & Technology (MeitY) asking why Vice Media (India), owned by US-based Vice International Holding Inc, was operating a news business in India. 

In October 2020, India issued new rules restricting foreign investment in digital news companies to 26% only after getting government approval. The next year, India updated the IT Act (pdf) laying out rules of operation for all digital news organisations that had been operating in a regulatory grey zone so far. 

Once it received the notices, Vice India began reviewing all its content that could be defined as ‘news’, both former Vice India employees quoted above said. The company geo-blocked some stories and related social media posts. The company also informally told its journalists to steer clear of any ‘newsy’ stories, especially those related to religion, caste, and politics, both former employees said. 

In April 2022, the company held an extraordinary general meeting and passed a resolution altering its memorandum of association and clarified that it was not in the business of news or current affairs. It was the second time since its launch that Vice India was giving up on news. Vice India probably had little choice. Per another company filing from January 2022, Vice India had borrowed $500,000 from its US holding firm in May 2019 and planned to raise another $10 million in the future. 

Vice wasn’t the only one affected by India’s restrictive rules on foreign direct investment (FDI) in digital news. Last December, the BBC announced it was restructuring its India operations to comply with the 26% cap in foreign investment. The announcement came months after India’s tax authorities raided the BBC’s offices in Delhi and Mumbai after it released a documentary reporting on Prime Minister Modi’s role in the 2002 Gujarat riots. 

Four senior BBC India employees left the firm to start a local firm called Collective Newsroom, which now employs all of the firm’s India employees. Collective Newsroom begins operations as a news provider to the BBC UK today. 

Several Indian digital news companies have filed petitions challenging the Act (see a full list here); all of them have been transferred to the Delhi High Court for a collective hearing.

Global vs. local 

Vice Media has had a hard time doing business for a while now. In May last year, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, following which it was acquired for $350 million, led by the hedge fund Fortress Group. Reports suggest the spendthrift and ‘brash’ ways of founder Shane Smith also contributed to the company’s demise. 

Yet, Vice India was making money. 

According to company filings, Vice Media (India) made just under Rs 60 lakh in revenue from operations In FY18, with net losses worth over Rs 4 crore. The next year, its revenue rose rapidly to over Rs 13 crore, but with losses of nearly Rs 12 crore. However, the company turned profitable in FY20 and made a modest net profit in FY22 and FY23 as well, company filings show. 

While Vice India’s editorial business seemed to be a non-starter, its branded content and studios business was doing relatively well. “Vice was a new entrant in the Indian market and was trying to educate brands on what it stood for,” a third former Vice India employee told The Impression, requesting anonymity as they were not authorised by their current employer to speak to the media. “But it found a lot of synergy. The branded content business was, in fact, the only bright spot in an otherwise difficult situation given that it started in 2018 and was hit by Covid only two years in.” Vice India had successful collaborations with large brands such as Budweiser and became the agency of record for several more. Just last month, it published social media content for brands such as Royal Enfield and McDowell’s on its Instagram handle. 

Besides, employees in the branded content teams were largely unaffected by layoffs at Vice India. It was also producing top tier docu-series for OTT platforms in India, including Indian Predator for Netflix and Rainbow Rishta and Cinema Marte Dum Tak for Amazon Prime Video. 

Arguably, Vice’s troubles in its home market took down the India operations. But at the heart of it, Vice India could not get its main product—news—in order. India’s onerous regulations on digital news just added to the chaos. 

“Nobody at the Vice India office understood what the Vice brand stood for,” the first former Vice India employee says. “Much of the content strategy for video and editorial included replicating or force-fitting 'edgy' coverage that the Vice US teams were doing for the Indian website. I won't dismiss all of it; some of the work produced by the India team and freelancers was actually good. But mostly, they were shooting in the dark."

With constant layoffs and changes in the editorial structure, teams found that the company kept shifting priorities on its news business. “The biggest question Vice [India] didn’t have an answer to was, ‘What is Vice?’” the second former Vice India employee told The Impression. “Teams were told to do ‘Vice-y’ stories. But in trying to cover the weird and the wonderful, we lost out on becoming the voice of the Indian youth,” something that made Vice a powerful media company to begin with. 

In the end, just like rival Buzzfeed, Vice gave up on the business of news altogether, awards and all. Last month, the company announced it was shutting down the Vice website altogether and laying off hundreds of employees (again).

Last Scroll Down📲

Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Election party: This is how crucial India’s 2024 general elections will be for those in the media business. X (formerly Twitter) has launched its fact-checking feature Community Notes in India just weeks before the country goes to the polls. This election year may be awash in fake news. Already, Microsoft has warned that China may use AI to spread misinformation and disrupt elections in India, South Korea, and the US. 

Demise reversal: India’s FMCG companies ran more ads (by volume) on TV and radio last year while reducing the number of ads it ran in print and online. This, despite a decline in the audience for both TV and radio. FMCG manufacturers are India’s highest spending advertisers. 

Safety net: India is framing new laws to protect the rights of publishers and content creators from AI, IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said last week. The legislation may be introduced as part of the proposed Digital India Bill, which is expected to replace the IT Act 2000. In December last year, The New York Times (NYT) sued OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging they were using NYT’s copyrighted content to train AI models. 

Desperate deal: Paramount Global may finally have a buyer. Per The Wall Street Journal, it is holding exclusive talks with Skydance for a $26 billion deal to take over the company. It needs a deal fast; Paramount shares have fallen by half in the last year.

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

We’ve all probably used the word ‘delve’ in a work email or a conversation at least once. You might want to consider an alternative if you’re looking to do business with tech bros abroad though. 

English entrepreneur and investor Paul Graham is of the opinion that cold emails and pitches using ‘delve’ are likely written by ChatGPT. He even offered data from this blog by innovation researcher Philip Shapira, which found that academic papers with the word in their title or abstract were likely written with help from AI tools. 

But wait, isn’t ‘delve’ widely used in formal conversation? This is one of those moments when Americans (and people from the West in general) suddenly discover that English sounds very different in the former colonies. Nigeria and India have probably contributed the most to expanding the Oxford English dictionary. In 2020, the Oxford English Dictionary recognised Nigerian English phrases such as ‘rub minds with’ and ‘send forth’. 

Most of the world is already forced to take exams and change accents to prove to people in the West that we can speak English well. Must we now worry about sounding AI-generated too? 

Perhaps it’s worth investigating if words like ‘delve’, which run counter to the American preference for informal straight-talk, are a product of artificial intelligence or just the sheer volume of English content created by people living outside the West. Shapira’s own data shows that papers published in Malaysia, Pakistan, and India were most likely to use the word ‘delve’. Maybe it’s ChatGPT, in line with the more lax standards for academia in these countries. Or maybe they just don’t speak American.

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thesignal.co with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

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This week marks one year of The Impression. We launched our first ever edition on April 5 last year, with this story on the moves technology giants YouTube and Amazon Prime Video are making in India’s OTT business. In these 46 editions of the past year (including today’s), we’ve got you stories on the biggest companies, technologies, and trends shaping the business of media, entertainment, and content in India.

Thank you for being part of the journey. 

As we head into the second year, I want to hear from you. 

What do you like about The Impression and what can we do to improve? More importantly, what would you like to see in future editions? Tell me everything in this short survey (<5 minutes). If you’d like to chat more, let’s connect! I am always available at soumya@thecore.in 

On to this week’s edition. 

Can Indian radio survive? 

Books, newspapers, TV, cinema theatres… it would seem the Grim Reaper internet has come to collect the remnants of everything that once made up mass media. In all these, radio is perhaps what most would consider a relic of a bygone era. 

The numbers show it too. Consulting firm EY estimates in its latest report (pdf) on India’s media and entertainment industry that radio earned Rs 2,300 crore in 2023, just under three-quarters of what it made in 2019. It is unlikely to reach pre-pandemic levels even by 2026. 

This is in line with the financial and market performance of India’s biggest private radio companies. Entertainment Networks India Ltd (ENIL), parent firm of the radio network Mirchi, earned only two-thirds of its 2019 revenue in FY2023 while posting a loss. In the nine months of FY24,it has swung back to profits but at Rs 347 crore, is still about half of its FY19 topline. Without an outstanding Q4, it will have another year with earnings below pre-pandemic levels. 

Similarly in FY23, Jagran Prakashan’s Music Broadcast Ltd (MBL), which owns Radio City, also earned about 60% of its FY19 revenue while eking out a 1.73% net profit margin. However, in FY24 so far, it has already made more than 80% of its FY19 revenues and has improved net profit margin to 4.25%, as of the December 2023 quarter, 

Others, like D B Corp, have reported steady growth in the radio business while others, such as HT Media, are struggling with the medium. Earlier this year, the company said it was ‘shutting down’ Fever FM, only to amend the announcement by revealing a new brand identity for its FM Radio operations. 

Yet, the markets aren’t buying into the spell of doom plaguing Indian radio. In FY24, both ENIL’s Mirchi and MBL’s Radio City outperformed not just the Nifty Media index, but also the Nifty 50. Notably, no major radio or news company (barring Network18) is a significant component of the Nifty Media index, which largely skews towards cinema chain PVR-INOX, Zee Entertainment, Saregama, and gaming firm Nazara, among others. 

Is radio airing a survival story? 

Change the game

When advertisers pick what to spend their ad budgets on, radio is usually way below in the list of priorities, if it is there at all. Besides, there are plenty of new options for audio ads—from music streaming companies like Spotify to other audio and podcasting platforms such as Pocket FM, which last month raised over $100 million in funding. 

Meanwhile, revenues for the radio business increased 10% in 2023, per the EY report quoted above, but ad rates fell 8% on average. But, EY found, radio stations received a huge surge in ads from small brands serving customers in just one small city or district. Four thousand four hundred and forty-four advertisers who put ads on the radio last year ran no marketing campaigns on TV, print, or digital media. 

Radio executives have understood that their power lies in going local. 

“The fact [is] that we are in Tier 2, Tier 3 markets, smaller markets, where dependence of advertisers on radio is higher,” Pawan Agarwal, deputy managing director of D B Corp told investors in an earnings call (pdf) earlier this year. “And also the delivery of radio is still better in Tier 2, Tier 3 markets… local programming in the last couple of years [sic], we haven't let any RJ go from our network, all 30 stations are running with radio jocks, local teams. So we build a local connection that's helping us build the local revenue.” 

Going local isn’t just limited to on-air programming. In its investor presentation (pdf) for the December 2023 quarter, D B Corp rattled off a list of offline events that its radio channel MY FM held across the country, from garba in Ahmedabad to a folk music concert in Punjab, diya lighting festivities in Ayodhya to even an award show in Bangkok.  

Rival Radio City is slowly morphing from being merely a radio station, building out its social media presence instead. “We will be investing in our digital play for the next two to three years,” Ashit Kukian, CEO of Music Broadcast Ltd told investors in an earnings call (pdf) earlier this year. Radio City has been expanding its reach on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook with sketch videos, ads for social good, and RJ interviews with celebrities. 

“We are working at two levels,” Kukian told investors. “One is the creation of content. Second is distribution of content on social media platforms [and] third-party platforms, which will allow brands who come to us to reach out to a larger set of audiences. So, there is an increased reach that the brands get, and that we get a larger set of value because we are delivering far more beyond radio.” 

Besides, Kukian said, the company was slowly transforming its RJs into social media influencers. 

The end result: Radio City can offer advertisers not just radio airtime but also opportunities for branded content, just like any other YouTube channel or social media influencer.

Blurred lines 

Eventually, it may become hard to tell a radio company apart from any other media firm. Consider the case of Radio Mirchi. In 2020, it rebranded itself, dropping the word ‘radio’ altogether. Three years later, it acquired Gaana (pdf), the music streaming service formerly owned by Times Internet Ltd. 

“​​The traditional medium is here to stay,” Yatish Mehrishi, CEO of ENIL, told investors in a call (pdf) earlier this year. “It may not be growth at what it used to be 10 years back. It will be a mixed growth. And we're looking at radio[‘s] plain vanilla growth, plus do [a] lot of events, multimedia solutions… and also look at the subscription game on Gaana.”

In September 2022, Gaana went entirely behind paywall after it ran out of cash and could not find anyone to buy it. By acquiring it, ENIL has effectively blurred the lines between its mainstay—the licensed radio business—and internet-based music streaming. “Our aim is, in two years, if digital revenues can become 25% to 30% of our radio revenues… as we move towards a more multi-platform entertainment company rather than the digital company, or just a radio company,” Mehrishi said in the call. Digital is currently 10% of the company’s radio revenues. 

Loosen the grip

Radio companies’ biggest trouble is that they are in a licensed business, struggling to make profits over staggering fixed costs. The industry is hopeful, ever since the telecom regulator TRAI proposed (pdf) removing the non-refundable one time entry fee or NOTEF for bidders who buy radio frequency spectrum. Instead, a radio licence will become a variable cost—4% of the radio channel’s gross revenue plus taxes. 

Besides, TRAI is considering allowing private radio channels to run hourly news bulletins with a self-regulatory body of radio operators to prevent the spread of misinformation. So far, only state-owned All India Radio was allowed to run the news. 

Radio operators have also asked the government to make it mandatory for smartphone makers to incorporate an FM radio receiver in handsets, which manufacturers aren’t thrilled about. 

But for now, no one in the industry expects TRAI to make any moves until after the general elections are over. Radio may no longer go back to its glory days, but it also may not need to. If all radio firms could turn into successful audio-video content companies, the market may soon value them on entirely new benchmarks.

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Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Full of gas: A group of US advertisers has filed a class action lawsuit against Meta, alleging Facebook and Instagram inflated ad viewership figures by up to 4X and over-charged them. Meta denies the allegations; advertisers are claiming $7 billion in damages. Along with Google, Meta dominates India’s ads market. The Indian Society of Advertisers is closely following the case. 

Disney villains fight: Reuters reports The Walt Disney Company may have secured enough shareholder votes to defeat Nelson Peltz and Jay Rasulo in their bid to control the company. Although high-profile institutional investors and members of the Disney family publicly took sides, the vote could come down to Disney’s large retail shareholding. The proxy battle has already served its purpose: Disney’s share price is already up more than 30% year-to-date. 

More snip snip: Last week, a special committee told Zee Entertainment to start cutting costs in its side jigs. Since then, it laid off half its employees in the company’s technology centre at Bengaluru. This week, MD and CEO Punit took a 20% pay cut; in FY23, he was paid over Rs 35 crore. 

Big money, narrow top: India now has over 9 lakh creators and influencer marketing will be worth Rs 3,375 crore in the next two years, a new report (pdf) by consulting firm EY says. But, only 12% earn more than Rs 1 lakh a month, and brands are shifting focus to influencers with a smaller following and measuring impact by the sales they make, not the campaign’s reach. 

What goes up: ...eventually comes down. Former US president Donald Trump’s Truth Social made headlines when it zoomed past valuations of larger, established social media companies in its stock market debut. Now, the stock has plunged after the company disclosed losses. Trump’s net worth fell by $1 billion in a single day. And the company is suing Trump’s co-founders for mismanagement. Is this another meme stock, this time fuelled by Trump fans? This Reuters report suggests so.

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

For an electronics accessories company, the Holy Grail is to one day have the same kind of chokehold on its consumers that Apple has achieved. Some, such as Chinese smartphone and electronics brand Xiaomi, found early success in simply lifting Apple’s designs. 

Homegrown brand boAt is no different in its ambition. But rather than copying Apple, it decided to deride the company that still sets standards for how personal electronics are made. Nobody, not even the most ardent boAt fan, would ever compare its mass market earphones and smartwatches with the Airpods or the Apple Watch.

But in making a ridiculous comparison, boAt has at least forced its customers and detractors to consider both brands in the same vein, something few would have imagined doing. 

Does it matter that the comparison makes little sense? 

Already, Apple is growing in prominence and market share in India, investing in local manufacturing and opening the Apple Store in the country at last. Companies planning an IPO (such as boAt) usually spend big money on celebrities and national marketing campaigns in the run up to a listing. boAt’s best bet perhaps wasn’t a Bollywood A-lister or a top cricketer (although actor Ranveer Singh is on board) but to simply ride on the coattails of the one brand whose earphones and watches everybody aspires to own.

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thesignal.co with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!

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Two weeks ago, I wrote in The Impression about how the small budget film is struggling to make ends meet, especially via regular routes such as a theatrical release or a sale to an OTT platform. 

In 2019, when UK-based arthouse cinema streaming company MUBI came to India, it was hailed as the answer to cinephiles’ prayers. That year, it launched with Oscar-winning producer Guneet Monga as a content advisor. MUBI also had a dedicated channel for Indian films, curated across genres, years, languages, and directors. This ranged from from Basu Chatterjee’s slice of life comedies and gritty black-and-white features of the ‘50s to contemporary, small features made by independent filmmakers searching for a breakthrough moment. 

A lot has changed since. For one, at the time of publishing this story, I found that MUBI has 362 expired films on its India catalogue, titles it is no longer streaming. Its Indian catalogue is vastly reduced to just 31 films, with only three of them made in the 2010s. The latest Indian film it has on offer is Pokhar Ke Dunu Paar, released in 2022. 

Instead, MUBI India’s focus seems to have shifted from being a home for both Indian and world cinema to being a platform for Indian cinema lovers to discover award-winning foreign films instead. In fact, its current focus is Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, for which MUBI has distribution rights outside the US, including India (in partnership with multiplex leader PVR-INOX). 

It’s a departure for a platform that first came to India hosting parallel cinema darlings such as Om-Dar-B-Dar (1988) and Salaam Bombay! (1988). Independent filmmakers are struggling for a profitable path to their audience. When (and why) did MUBI step away from this role? 

The mainstream-ing of MUBI India

MUBI does not have an incorporated entity in India, although it has a content team on ground headed by Svetlana Naudiyal, the company’s programming director for the Asia Pacific region. For calendar year 2022, the UK parent reported a 53% increase in revenue, though accompanied by wider losses. However, these figures were for its operations in the UK only; there are no numbers available for the company’s overall performance. In 2018, it raised an undisclosed round from Times Bridge, the investment arm of The Times Group, to fund its expansion in the country. Per research firm Tracxn’s estimates, MUBI has raised a total of $32.3 million since it was founded in 2007. 

MUBI India did not respond to emails asking for comments. 

By all accounts, MUBI’s presence in India is marginal compared to bigger subscription-model foreign rivals such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Two of its sources of revenue—theatrical film distribution and MUBI GO—were practically shut down during the pandemic as films held off India restricted cinemas to 50% occupancy. 

In 2022, the platform reintroduced MUBI GO, a subscription plan that offers customers a free movie ticket every week to watch a specially curated film. MUBI GO costs just under twice the price of a regular annual subscription in India. 

MUBI has spent over 15 years acquiring an audience dedicated to ‘art house’, ‘independent’, or simply non-mainstream cinema from around the world. Its key differentiator from other competitors and Big Tech rivals producing Oscar-winning films is that it offers a curated library of cinema to subscribers instead of simply dumping a never-ending menu of shows and films with few ways to discover something new. Many films in MUBI’s library are available for a limited time, prompting viewers to watch them on a schedule, much like they would at a theatre or a film festival. 

While MUBI is working to acquire and retain a loyal audience with an international catalogue, it seems to have given up on the task of building an equally compelling library of Indian cinema. 

Film industry insiders I spoke to say they repeatedly encounter the same problem when dealing with MUBI in India: it offers extremely low prices for streaming rights. 

On average, MUBI licences the rights to independent films in India for $500-1,000, going up to $2,000-2,500 for some titles. That comes to about Rs 40,000- Rs 1.25 lakh, hardly enough to begin covering the production cost of even films made using little more than an iPhone, a small room for a set, and a skeletal crew of 3-4 people. 

“MUBI only works for filmmakers who have made their films on very tiny or almost no budget at all,” Mauli Singh, a Mumbai-based independent film producer and publicist, told The Impression. “There are filmmakers who travel to their villages to save costs and make films successfully. Otherwise, MUBI pays a couple of lakhs [of rupees] even for films made for Rs 1-2 crore.” 

However, Singh adds, there is still value in what MUBI offers filmmakers striking it out on their own. “They have built a great audience set, and it is a great platform for film buffs to discover all indie films in one place,” she says. “They don’t pay much but then they also don’t take exclusive rights to a film.”

Typically, filmmakers sell streaming rights to their films to MUBI for a limited period of time—say, 2-3 years—often for India only. That leaves them free to pursue other streams of revenue, such as an international theatrical/streaming release or running the film in foreign film festivals. As I wrote in this edition of The Impression, small and indie filmmakers have realised that the ideal way to recover their investment in a small film is to monetise it in as many ways as possible, beyond the traditional route of a theatrical release and an eventual sale to an OTT platform. 

This is similar to how other OTT platforms structure streaming rights deals with filmmakers and production firms, big and small. The trouble for small filmmakers is that while MUBI may have exactly the audience they’re looking for, it isn’t profitable for them to strike a deal with the platform. 

“What I don’t like about MUBI is that it has built a valuation of over $100 million on the shoulders of independent filmmakers, but it isn’t willing to pay them fairly,” says a film distributor, requesting anonymity. Another industry insider told The Impression, on condition of anonymity, that small filmmakers were able to profitably licence their work to MUBI by keeping production costs extremely low. However, when these streaming rights come up for renewal, the platform sometimes offers only a fraction of the already-low offer price. 

High acquisition costs have made it difficult for subscription-based streaming platforms to make money in India. Worldwide, subscription-based streaming platforms are struggling to turn profits, with the exception of Netflix. Meanwhile, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ are rolling out ad tiers. It stands to reason that MUBI’s India unit looks to control costs while relying on high-profile international deals—such as the one for Priscilla—to hold on to its niche Indian audience.

However, in a 2019 interview, MUBI’s founder-CEO Efe Cakarel and then-content advisor Guneet Monga had described the company’s carefully curated channel of Indian films as a crucial offering to subscribers here and abroad. 

“There are multiple Indias in India, it’s such a rich culture of cinematic heritage,” Cakarel said. “When you launch in a country, you start doing licensing deals with local distributors. So, we’ll start getting bigger films… There is going to be MUBI, and there will be the MUBI India channel with a new film every day. The more I get into Indian cinema, the more I realise how rich it is. It needs to be highlighted on its own.” 

Perhaps for MUBI India, that richness of Indian cinema just isn’t a rich enough business.

Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that ‘Gamak Ghar’ (2019) was the latest Indian movie available on MUBI.

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Scan the big media headlines from the week gone by

Snip snip: Sony merger nixed, Zee Entertainment is now looking for costs to cut. Earlier this week, the company appointed a special committee to review all business verticals and guide the management on how to achieve a 20% Ebitda (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) margin. That committee has told Zee to rejig side businesses such as short video app HiPi and tech startup Sugarbox. 

Bat-ball business: Even as JioCinema recorded 11.3 crore cumulative views on the opening day of this year’s IPL, rival SonyLIV is spending $100 million for streaming rights to New Zealand cricket until 2031, The Economic Times reports. Meanwhile, Amazon Prime Video’s surprise January move to invest $115 million in bankrupt US regional sports network Diamond Sports Group can set the platform up for more ad revenue while helping it retain a loyal sports fanbase, Financial Times argues. 

Truth always wins: Truth Social, that is. The right-wing leaning Twitter alternative owned by former US president Donald Trump surged 16% on its first day of trading, pushing its price-to-sales valuation past the much, much bigger rival Reddit Inc., which also recently debuted on the bourses. 

Unfree press: Several photojournalists covering protests by workers of the Aam Aadmi Party against its leader Arvind Kejriwal were attacked and injured by Delhi Police personnel. The Press Club of India demanded a ‘high-level inquiry’ into the incident.

Separately, the Supreme Court set aside a Delhi High Court order to Bloomberg, which asked it to take down a story on an alleged $241 million fraud by Zee Entertainment’s promoters. 

Trumpet 🎺

Dissecting this week’s viral ‘thing’

Should you care about the personal lives of people in business? 

This week and last, two similar stories hit the headlines. First, a long investigation by New York Magazine into the many allegedly manipulative affairs of science podcaster and influencer Andrew Huberman. Second was a smaller report breaking the news that Zomato’s founder Deepinder Goyal had married his partner, a former model-turned-entrepreneur. 

There aren’t too many direct links between Goyal and Huberman. But they come together because of these two stories digging into the personal lives of two men who also happen to be popular among health enthusiasts in India’s startup-tech employee crowd. 

Huberman’s supporters called the investigation into his relationships a ‘hit piece’, arguing that a fitness influencer’s personal life choices—such as to have six simultaneous affairs—has little bearing on his work or public life. Some fans of his advice on productivity and longevity are taking the story of Huberman’s multiple affairs as evidence that his science truly works. Scientists themselves have criticised Huberman’s claims, especially those related to dietary supplements. Some of his critics now say that Huberman’s willingness to deceive so many women he was romantically involved with shows how easy it is for him to lie to anyone… including his audience. 

That may be a fair justification, but there are plenty of successful men in the arts and the sciences known to be unsavoury characters in their personal lives. 

But what value does a reader derive from knowing the wedding plans of a food delivery founder? Some startup founders criticised the editorial decision, asking if every funded startup founder’s wedding made for a business story.

It’s a valid point, as is the counter-argument that business news readers are interested in the personal lives of successful founders. Besides, if the pre-wedding party of the son of India’s richest businessman can be national (and international) headlines for days, what’s wrong with a little story on a founder’s wedding? 

That’s all this week. If you enjoyed reading The Impression, please share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And please write to me anytime at soumya@thesignal.co with thoughts, feedback, criticism or anything you’d like to see discussed in this space. I'd love to hear from you. 

Thanks for reading, and see you again next Wednesday!