FEATURES
India’s drama queen Ekta Kapoor has her eye on streaming
23 March 2016
India’s largest TV production company, the 22-year-old Balaji Telefilms, has made its biggest move ever – raising US$23 million to finance and build a direct-to-consumer subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) platform, ALT Balaji.
ALT (meaning alternative) is scheduled to launch in mid-2016 and intends to offer 200-300 hours of original programming a year.
Group CEO, Sameer Nair, forecasts four million subscribers by 2020, each paying anywhere between Rs60/US$1 and Rs120/US$2 a month. He estimates that by then, Balaji’s revenues will be evenly split between TV, films and digital.
“Five years later, ALT should be bigger than TV and films,” he adds.
Currently TV content brings in 80% of revenues and films 20%.
Ekta Kapoor, Balaji’s joint managing director and creative lead, says the aim is an online direct-to-consumer model. “The day we own our IP, the business will change,” she says.
Balaji today owns a fraction of its IP. The bulk of its revenue comes from programming commissioned by broadcasters.
India’s US$7.2-billion television industry has always been a buyers market, awash with producers scrambling to undercut each other and broadcasters demanding IP ownership.
At US$321 million in topline, over 1,200 hours of programming every year and with 20% of the total viewership of the top Hindi general entertainment channels, Balaji is by far India’s biggest content creation success story.
Much of this is attributed to Kapoor and her mom Shobha, Balaji’s operational brains.
Kapoor began small with a couple of shows for Zee TV in 1994 – fiction thriller Mano ya na Mano (Believe it or not) and family sitcom Hum Paanch (We Five). Both did well and Balaji took off, going public in mid-2000 and premiering its biggest hits – Kyunkii Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (Because the mother-in-law was also a daughter-in-law once) and Kahanii Ghar Ghar Kii (The story of every household).
Kahanii Ghar Ghar Kii aired in the slot after Star Plus’s Kaun Banega Crorepati (Who wants to be a Millionaire), credited with turning around the fortunes of Star TV and Rupert Murdoch in India. Kapoor turned the spill-over viewers into loyal audiences for eight years, and Balaji became known for lavish productions full of impossible plot twists and women who cooked and slept in full finery.
But Kapoor has also been accused of regressive television for the way her shows portray women. She, however, maintains that TV is a mass medium on which only so much envelope-pushing can happen.
She points to Love, Sex aur Dhoka (Love, Sex and Betrayal), the first film Balaji produced, which uses honour killings, sting operations and news media to tell a satirical tale.
“We wanted to do something completely different from what Balaji Telefilms stood for,” she says today.
The corporate direction she needed came from an 18-day workshop at Harvard for owner/managers in 2013. The first thing she did on her return to India was establish an advisory board, which in turn hired Nair, formerly with Star TV and NDTV as group CEO.
Of all the ideas discussed, the one being implemented most seriously is IP ownership across all platforms.
It is an idea that suits her at this stage of life. “TV is very mass, especially now that boxes are shifting to small towns. The net is more abou...
India’s largest TV production company, the 22-year-old Balaji Telefilms, has made its biggest move ever – raising US$23 million to finance and build a direct-to-consumer subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) platform, ALT Balaji.
ALT (meaning alternative) is scheduled to launch in mid-2016 and intends to offer 200-300 hours of original programming a year.
Group CEO, Sameer Nair, forecasts four million subscribers by 2020, each paying anywhere between Rs60/US$1 and Rs120/US$2 a month. He estimates that by then, Balaji’s revenues will be evenly split between TV, films and digital.
“Five years later, ALT should be bigger than TV and films,” he adds.
Currently TV content brings in 80% of revenues and films 20%.
Ekta Kapoor, Balaji’s joint managing director and creative lead, says the aim is an online direct-to-consumer model. “The day we own our IP, the business will change,” she says.
Balaji today owns a fraction of its IP. The bulk of its revenue comes from programming commissioned by broadcasters.
India’s US$7.2-billion television industry has always been a buyers market, awash with producers scrambling to undercut each other and broadcasters demanding IP ownership.
At US$321 million in topline, over 1,200 hours of programming every year and with 20% of the total viewership of the top Hindi general entertainment channels, Balaji is by far India’s biggest content creation success story.
Much of this is attributed to Kapoor and her mom Shobha, Balaji’s operational brains.
Kapoor began small with a couple of shows for Zee TV in 1994 – fiction thriller Mano ya na Mano (Believe it or not) and family sitcom Hum Paanch (We Five). Both did well and Balaji took off, going public in mid-2000 and premiering its biggest hits – Kyunkii Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (Because the mother-in-law was also a daughter-in-law once) and Kahanii Ghar Ghar Kii (The story of every household).
Kahanii Ghar Ghar Kii aired in the slot after Star Plus’s Kaun Banega Crorepati (Who wants to be a Millionaire), credited with turning around the fortunes of Star TV and Rupert Murdoch in India. Kapoor turned the spill-over viewers into loyal audiences for eight years, and Balaji became known for lavish productions full of impossible plot twists and women who cooked and slept in full finery.
But Kapoor has also been accused of regressive television for the way her shows portray women. She, however, maintains that TV is a mass medium on which only so much envelope-pushing can happen.
She points to Love, Sex aur Dhoka (Love, Sex and Betrayal), the first film Balaji produced, which uses honour killings, sting operations and news media to tell a satirical tale.
“We wanted to do something completely different from what Balaji Telefilms stood for,” she says today.
The corporate direction she needed came from an 18-day workshop at Harvard for owner/managers in 2013. The first thing she did on her return to India was establish an advisory board, which in turn hired Nair, formerly with Star TV and NDTV as group CEO.
Of all the ideas discussed, the one being implemented most seriously is IP ownership across all platforms.
It is an idea that suits her at this stage of life. “TV is very mass, especially now that boxes are shifting to small towns. The net is more about youth and about urban audience that has been marginalised (by mass TV),” she says.
She adds that ALT Balaji is about an upmarket, urban audience wanting to see more contemporary stuff. The people watching Scandal, Narcos, Empire or Shameless, the shows she is devouring these days.
“As a producer I would like to explore human psychology and urban dilemmas,” Kapoor says, warming as always to talk that turns creative.
India’s single TV homes and family viewing habits restrict that. With ALT Balaji, she hopes she can push the envelope.
Has her creative instinct, which has so effectively captured the pulse of audiences across film and TV, changed over 20 years of writing and creating entertainment?
“It hasn’t changed”, she says, adding: “But it has sharpened”.
And she has a US$23m+ bet that this will work well for digital. – Vanita Kohli-Khandekar
Published on ContentAsia's Issue One 2016, 23 March 2016
Previous
Next
