Indian Television Market: Opportunities

There is a wonderful article in New York Times this week, In India, The Golden Age of Television is Now.

“Indian films, especially the flashy musicals and dramas of Bollywood, have grabbed plenty of attention in the West. But the country’s lesser-known television business is more than twice as big, with an estimated $3.4 billion in revenue in 2005, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. It is also starting to exert greater cultural influence.

Television ownership is growing fast here, and it has plenty more room to expand. There are roughly 105 million homes with televisions in India, up from 88 million in 2000. The current number of television households is about the same as in the United States, though for India that amounts to only about half of the country’s households, compared with 98 percent in the United States.”

As generation Y moves away from Television and onto the Internet and Mobile Phones in the US, the Indian market is still largely Television centric, with both PC and Internet penetration still limited.

This implies, one of the most important content business opportunities for India is still TV Networks and Programming. The question is, where are the opportunities to find niches that are still open? The market is already quite crowded, especially with Zee, Star and others covering the Hindi market, and both local and international channels covering the English markets.

A while ago, I had looked into the animation market from the perspective of TV serials. However, the economics did not look compelling. [You can read the analysis, Indian Anime, here.]

I have also looked into vernacular network opportunities. The top Indian languages are:
Hindi (337M), Bengali (69.5M), Telugu (66M), Marathi (62.5M), Tamil (53M), Urdu (43.4M), Gujarati (40.6M), Kannada (32.7M), Malayalam (30.3M), Oriya (28M), Punjabi (23.3M), Assamese (13M). [English – 20M, btw.]

Notice, even the smallest of the above niches has a 13M target audience, so not too shabby.

My hypothesis is, there are opportunities in rolling up networks and building a large portfolio based on regional language assets. Similarly, there are opportunities of starting new and unique networks in regional languages, which would be good acquisition candidates in a few years, as the market consolidates.