The News Broadcasters Federation, a collective of more than 70 national and regional news channels, recently held its first national conclave in Delhi. The event, which focused on the “future of news” in India and more specifically on broadcast news, was striking for a couple of reasons. A cursory look at the broadcasters making up the NBF collective reveals an interesting picture of youthful ambition and entrepreneurship of mostly upstarts in a media landscape that has long been dominated by large corporates and legacy media houses.
The event also had its repeated interrogation of the many existential issues staring in the face of broadcasting in general, and broadcast news in particular. From audience measurement, content pricing, and new revenue models to legacy issues of rates and rating points, serious questions facing the industry were debated and key stakeholders were interrogated on the shifting sands within the industry.
The NBF, which was born out of a schism within the broader broadcast news fraternity National Broadcaster’s Association (NBA) has been at the centre stage of a polarising debate within the industry over both ethics of television news and norms of audience measurement.
The splintering was unusual given how tightly knit the broadcast community is under the umbrella of the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBDF) (previously known as IBF) where consensus and collaboration were largely the norms on issues facing the broadcasters—from the New Tariff Regime to various policy interventions. The fault lines between the two news broadcast collectives had widened with the politicisation of Audience Measurement fraud by the previous MVA-led Maharashtra state government. Criminal cases were foisted on industry professionals, and the police apparatus in Mumbai was misused to settle political scores and personal differences.
While these apparent factors have contributed to the splintering of the broadcast news community, there is an underlying deeper divide over the future of news.
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Radical new formats
The legacy media houses and large corporates have defined the common consensus around what is acceptable as broadcast news during the two decades after the advent of private television channels in India. However, with the emergence of upstarts in the industry, the rules of prime time news have been rewritten and radical new formats of content are being experimented with. It is in this uninhibited and raw energy to innovate and remake the industry that the deeper roots of this schism lie.
It is no wonder that the first serious attempt at technology-led content innovation within the broadcast news industry has come from this younger collective with the launch of a news and views OTT platform News9Plus by TV9 recently focused on the English-speaking audience. With the launch of news-oriented web series on established entertainment OTT platforms by a legacy media house, we are witnessing the beginning of a competitive cycle of content innovation between incumbents and upstarts. It is in this competitive churning that the future of news in India lies.
While much of the public debate around this competitive schism has focused on the failings of the TV audience measurement system in India, there has been little focus on the values that will matter to the future of news. Most of the issues with BARC, the incumbent TV rating agency, arise from a flawed understanding of the underlying statistics and a competitive culture that has seen both incumbents and upstarts manipulate the measurement system. While the current sample-based methodology for TV ratings is well suited to estimate habitual viewing behaviour of general entertainment, it is ill-suited to objectively measure viewership of specific events at a point in time unless they are mass viewing phenomena such as live sports.
Alternatives to the sample-based measurement that are based on census-wide or big data approaches such as “return path data” have significant technical and cost barriers before industry-wide adoption is possible in a country like India. Solving the measurement problems confronting TV news requires disruptive innovations that can creatively leverage sensors on ubiquitously available smartphones at a low cost to objectively measure viewership in a census-wide manner similar to internet streaming. Achieving industry-wide consensus on such innovations will require the various stakeholders to overcome their mutual distrust of each other in the overall interest of the industry.
The first step towards such confidence-building would be for the industry to eschew the use of landing pages to artificially boost viewership data. The use of landing pages has attained such absurdity that a news channel is claiming a higher reach than popular entertainment channels. While there are calls for the audience measurement system to redress this, it would be unwise to burden the algorithms from having to tell natural organic viewership from such fake ones. As an alternative, a regulatory intervention could address this issue that mandates only platform services to be used as landing pages. Such a stipulation would ensure that platforms can monetise landing pages for marketing and promotion without tampering with the integrity of the organic viewership of television channels.
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Trust and collaboration
The future of news lies in creative content formats such as short videos and pricing innovation leveraging the digitalisation of payments through UPI. The use of disruptive technologies such as sensors, AI, and direct-to-mobile for broadcasting over 5G will be a key differentiator within the competitive landscape. However, the core values of news will continue to define audience choice and brand loyalty. This is evident from recent surveys by the Reuters Institute for Journalism and CSDS, which have highlighted how the technologically challenged Public Broadcaster’s radio and TV arms, Doordarshan and All India Radio, continue to be highly trusted sources of news in India.
While both the upstarts and incumbents seek the short-term attention of audiences across India in a highly competitive media landscape, the winners, in the long run, will be those who inspire trust and confidence within audiences. Overcoming the existential issues facing the industry will, however, require both the incumbents and upstarts to find common ground to collaborate on innovative industry-wide solutions that can help break away from the current vicious cycle of destructive competition.
Shashi Shekhar Vempati is former CEO of Prasar Bharati, India’s Public Service Broadcaster. He tweets @shashidigital. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)