"It will take time for OTT to challenge TV": NP Singh

During the past year, Sony Pictures Networks India (SPNI) has been in the news for its aggressive investments, consolidation and new launches. As the network turns 21 in India, afaqs! interviewed SPNI's CEO, NP Singh. Seventeen years into Sony, Singh's work is his life, "The first thing that comes to my mind after I wake up is when will I reach office," he says.

Singh believes that in some genres the digital evolution is impacting television and that the industry is in a phase of 'transition'. However, his major focus in the coming years is to make the most of the investments already made.

Edited Excerpts

I must confess, when I came in I knew nothing about media. All my learning and training in media happened while working here. When you have so much of learning about a company and the industry, it becomes easier to take up leadership positions. You have the complete perspective of anything and everything that happened in the past, is happening now and how it will impact our business in the future.

If you are continuing to grow as a professional at any place, there is no need for you to change jobs. I came in as chief financial officer and got the opportunity to move on to general management and become the chief operating officer. Now I am heading the company.

What was needed at that time was a complete overhaul of the team at the channel and some fresh energy and thinking. Danish (Khan) as the head of the channel put together a team of experienced professionals who had deep understanding of not just Hindi general entertainment as a genre but also of the viewer.

They were able to pick content that would resonate with the viewer and, from a communication perspective, they were able to carve out communication that would successfully appeal to the viewer. The work is only half done, but I am happy that we have taken positive strides.

With successful shows coming on the channel, starting with The Kapil Sharma Show and then Super Dancer and some fiction starting to resonate with viewers, we have seen good traction from advertisers. That shows in the numbers too. In the first seven months, we grew 40 per cent over last year.

Not really! We have two strong non-fiction shows, which have taken the channel to leadership position on weekends. I must confess that we have seen limited success when it comes to fiction, but I am confident that the kind of content that we have on air and with what is coming up in the next three months, we will see a resurgence of viewership on weekdays as well.

SAB is uniquely positioned in the market. It is the only family humour channel. We have carefully crafted that positioning over the last 10 years. We would like to retain that and consolidate it further with new content. In the last three months, we launched a few new shows, which earned us some new viewers on the channel.

Sony stands for variety while SAB is focused on family humour. They don't really overlap in terms of the target group they appeal to - instead they complement each other.

There is a huge mass of viewers who want to see Hindi movies on their TV screens, so we have not really seen any negative impact on Hindi movies. At present, it is the younger generation that consumes a lot of content on OTT platforms. Hindi movies traditionally cater to the older male in the smaller markets rather than the larger ones. As far as OTT consumption is concerned we are seeing growth in the larger markets, especially metros.

There are online players who are aggressively acquiring streaming rights of new blockbuster movies and will start streaming those in the next few months. Then we will be able to see what happens. My view is that India is a very large market with immense headroom for growth. We will continue to see growth in consumption of Hindi movie content - both old and new - on TV screens. It will take some time for OTT to become a big challenger to TV in this market.

On the English general entertainment side, there is a little bit of dispersion at present. The viewer has not yet decided whether he or she wants to consume more on mobile phones and tablets or on TV.

Many viewers of English general entertainment content who were consuming through piracy were given an offer to consume the content simultaneously with the US on TV and there was a reasonable success with that formula. It will take another year more for people to settle down and be sure about the medium they are comfortable with. But for now we are seeing an impact on the viewership of English general entertainment channels.

There is some impact, but not to the extent of English GEC.

Both will co-exist in our market. While the West moved towards cutting the cord very quickly, it will take a long time for Indian viewers to make a complete move towards OTT. TV still has the pride of place in the living room of almost all households. And that is not going away soon.

A year ago we saw a shift from television to digital and now we are beginning to see a reversal. In the international market too, people are starting to realise that putting all your dollars on digital is not a prudent strategy because you don't get the ROI. So they are also moving back to the traditional media of communication.

That's what we are seeing in India too. Give it one more year. Once the viewer is settled, we will see advertising money flowing one way or the other or both.

There were two gaps in our portfolio. One was kids and the second edutainment. BBC is the largest producer of factual entertainment content in the world and it made absolute sense for us to get that brand and content to the market.

Anybody who is curious to know about anything in life would be a potential viewer of Sony BBC Earth and I believe all of us are curious.

There are three pillars of our strategy - entertainment, digital and sports. Last year, when ESPN wanted to re-enter the market we decided to partner with them. That was when I realised that it is important for us to expand our footprint even further with sports. This included cricket.

We made serious investments in football too. We were also looking to expand our portfolio of contact sports. All of this was complemented by Ten Sports' portfolio. That's why we decided to get into a conversation. Soon, we will integrate the channels in our network.

It's not a question of being dependent on any one property or channel. It is important for us to see what works for the viewer and bring it to the viewer as long as it makes economic sense.

When Ten Sports, post the regulatory approvals, gets integrated to our sports network, we will become a strong player. We are getting set to broadcast the 10th season of IPL and it is an important event in the calendar of sports each year.

When you have such a huge property scheduled in the summer (April and May) - a period when there is no major cricketing action happening elsewhere - the full focus is on IPL. But that doesn't necessarily mean the network is dependent on a particular event.

We showed our intent a few years ago by getting into KPL (Karnataka Premier League) and witnessed early success. Now, other states are also looking ahead towards such opportunities and with the right amount of investment and attention these properties can become bigger. It also makes good business sense for all stakeholders.

Our first intent was to invest in genres where we are present and then to consolidate further in genres where our presence was either limited or not there.

That is what we have been doing over the last three years - investing in sports or getting into new genres like edutainment or kids. Now it's time to consolidate all our investments. I would like to do that for some time. Meanwhile, if any opportunity of investment arises in the regional market, we will look at it closely.

It is important for a network to be available in all markets where its viewers exist. Regional sits is in the important category but not in the essential category. We have run a successful network over the last 21 years without a significant presence in the regional market.

Having said that, we have made our way to the regional markets through sports. We had multilingual feeds for FIFA World Cup and have telecast the IPL in multiple languages including Southern ones. When we launch Sony BBC Earth it will be in multiple languages, as will our kids' channel.

Even though it's been a year of BARC, people are trying to understand that market a little better. We have seen a huge growth in viewership of our channels operating in the rural markets.

Pal will continue to air archival content and there are no plans of releasing fresh content on the channel at this stage.

Yes, there is. Advertising video on demand (AVOD) and subscription video on demand (SVOD) are the models that we are working on. It is more AVOD at this stage, but we are seeing significant traction and growth in terms of advertising.

This has been a very busy year for Sony Liv. We had to invest a lot in technology and also in the product itself. We need to improve the number of downloads of Sony Liv and that is the biggest area of focus at this stage.

The ratio at this stage is quite similar to that of the industry. It is more skewed to advertising with 65 per cent coming in from there and 35 per cent from subscription.

We have seen limited benefits of digitisation in terms of revenue growth but I am optimistic that in the next three years this equation will change significantly and subscription revenue will go up to 45 per cent.

This interview was first published in our magazine afaqs! Reporter on December 15, 2016.

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