Media was massively overdue for a change before Covid-19 hit; cash has become a substitute for creative ingenuity in content creation leading to impossible breakeven costs; there’s no saying how many businesses will take advantage of opportunities opening up post-pandemic; and streaming is the future of television, The Walt Disney Company APAC president and chairman, Star & Disney India, Uday Shankar told delegates at Media Partners Asia’s APOS virtual event last week. 

“A transformation was long overdue in strategy and ways of doing business,” Shankar said, adding that “muscle memory and inertia generated over the years kept us going. 

“Covid-19 and the disruption has brought the spotlight back firmly on how to get back to business and that’s a great opportunity,” he said, highlighting the opportunity to revisit costs, implement different business models in the face of advertising disruption and adjusting the approach to creativity. 

“In a couple of years, some companies will see themselves as created by the crisis and some will disappear,” he predicted. 

Disney’s biggest metric of streaming success was subscriber numbers, he said. 

“I’m not a big believer in first mover advantage but we just happened to be first movers in India at a time when the market was not ready for streaming... our instincts were right, what Jio has done and others have followed is to completely transform what was the biggest laggard in data into the most exciting market in the world”.

Shankar pointed to the decision to launch Disney+ in India “right in the middle of the crisis in April” when the whole country was in lockdown. 

“Advertising was interrupted, we could not fulfil the marketing plans or the live sports… and yet we decided to launch and today we are by far the biggest streaming service in India,” he said, talking about being at the epicentre of creating a “completely different level of digital ecosystem”. 

“For us the only benchmark is can Disney+Hotstar compete with our television channels in terms of reach, delivery and consumption. If streaming has to become really mainstream and has to serve the local population at scale and become sustainable in business terms, that is the only metric anyone will have to follow,” he said. 

While streaming is the future, television was not going anywhere. 

“I am not one of those ready to give up on TV,” he said. 

Yet some streaming services will emerge as real challenges to TV.

“Our ambition is to be the biggest competitor to television ourselves,” he said, talking about a mobile universe of 750 million in India compared to a TV universe of 150-160 million.