Given YouTube’s popularity and the fact that sports channels are betting big of live sports online, will TV die before printIJ Kushan Mitra analyses
More people watch more minutes of video on YouTube in India than they do on any other channel. This is not a statement made in jest, this is a matter of fact. So much so that today most Indian entertainment and news channels have a substantial presence on the video streaming site. Indians, on their desktops, tablets and mobile phones, have fallen in love with Internet video.
Cisco, in its recent Virtual Networking Index (VNI) forecast, expects Internet data traffic in India to grow six-fold in India between 2012 and 2017, one of the fastest rates of growth in the world. Total Internet data traffic is expected to be 33.5 exabytes in 2017, the equivalent of eight billion DVDs per year, or just under a million DVDs worth of content per hour. And with a total user base of 348 million users as against 132 million users today — not the ‘total’ connectivity that we should hope for, but still is a quarter of Indians can access the Internet — India will become the third-largest Internet market in the world behind China and the United States.
The recent move by Star Sports to start broadcasting live games on its website in High-Definition with a constant stream of player information below the screen is a sign of the change. The fact is that television remains a mainly fixed medium, you can only watch it where there is a screen. And there are not many screens outside homes and offices.
The Internet changes that; you can watch TV on the move, and not just a few channels. On YouTube and other video streaming sites such as DailyMotion and Vimeo, you can watch almost anything and everything including full movies and TV shows. And you can watch them on the move, thanks to high-speed data networks, and also anywhere. So even if you are travelling to a country where you do not get live cricket broadcasts, you can watch the match on the web. Even if you are on holiday with your family, your spouse need not be deprived of either soap operas or Indian news channels.
However, for this growth to take place, there needs to be more bandwidth available, and as of today that is a problem in India. The growth of wired broadband has been far too slow, thanks to regulatory issues particularly concerning last-mile connectivity. Wireless broadband over 3G networks has progressed, and thanks to new pricing schemes by manufacturers of high-end smartphones more Indians are buying good smartphones than ever before. In fact, global sales of smartphones exceeded that of regular feature-phones last quarter and even in India the switch might take place sooner than later.
But to ensure this growth and also to ensure that the market is not captured by any one player, the Government needs to be proactive in auctioning more spectrum, particularly in lower frequencies such as 700 megahertz. This, along with greater focus on tax collection, was one of the reasons the Government began the process of digitisation of cable networks a few years ago, and despite a few hiccups, this move has been moving apace.
Across many countries, easy availability of broadband connections has transformed the video market. For example, in several countries consumers watch TV shows and movies through online streaming sites instead of watching them during the shows broadcast time. The producers of these shows have realised that to combat piracy through torrent sites and through illegal streaming, they have to offer consumers these shows. If consumers can easily watch the content they want to watch anytime and anywhere, they will not mind paying a little bit.
The other big change has been in television. Today, all flat-panel displays above a certain size have become ‘Smart TVs’, wherein you are able to access the Internet over a wired or wireless connection. The differentiation between a computer and a TV is disappearing. The eventual idea is the ‘Three-Screen Theory’ and you will be able to access and watch your favourite content across screens, depending on what is available to you at that point of time. At home it could be the TV, on the move it could be your tablet/computer or mobile phone.
The Internet was described as being the killer of the print medium, but it is quickly destroying the classical notion of television as we grew up with. Recently, Prasar Bharati started a pilot to broadcast TV signals onto mobiles, but this might be too little, too late. It is not as if video content will die, it will only grow manifold, but TV as you and I know is dying and the Indian television industry ought to be prepared for that as well.