TeaThe News Broadcasters Federation, a conglomerate of over 70 national and regional news channels, recently organized its first national conference in Delhi. The programme, which focused on the “future of news” in India and broadcast news in particular, was striking for a few reasons. A cursory look at the broadcasters that make up the NBF group reveals an interesting picture of youthful ambition and entrepreneurship, mostly upstarts in a media landscape dominated by large corporates and legacy media houses.
The incident also led to repeated inquiries into many existential issues facing broadcasting in general and broadcast news in particular. From the age-old issues of audience measurement, content pricing, and new revenue models to rates and rating points, serious questions facing the industry were debated and key stakeholders were questioned on the shifting sand within the industry.
The NBA, which was born out of a controversy within the wider broadcast news fraternity, has been at the center of polarizing debate within the industry over both the ethics of National Broadcasters Association (NBA) television news and the criteria for audience measurement.
This scatter was unusual as the broadcasting community is under the umbrella of the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBDF) (formerly known as IBF), where consensus and cooperation were the norm on the issues facing broadcasters at large – the new tariff regime. from various policy interventions. The blame lines between the two news broadcasting groups were widened with the politicization of audience measurement. Danger! By the Maharashtra State Government headed by the previous MVA. Criminal cases were imposed on industry professionals, and the police machinery in Mumbai was misused to settle political scores and personal differences.
While these obvious factors have contributed to the disintegration of the broadcast news community, there is an inherently deep division over the future of news.
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radical new format
Over the two decades since the advent of private television channels in India, the old media houses and large corporates have come to a consensus defining what is acceptable as broadcast news. However, with the rise of upstarts in the industry, the rules for prime time news have been rewritten and new formats of content are being experimented with. The deep roots of this scholarship are in this uninterrupted and raw energy of reshaping and rebuilding the industry.
It should come as no surprise that the first serious foray into technology-led content innovation within the broadcast news industry has come with the launch of a news and ideas OTT platform by this young group. news9plus TV9 recently focused on the English speaking audience. With the launch of news-oriented web series on entertainment OTT platforms set up by an old media house, we are witnessing the beginning of a competitive cycle of content innovation among incumbents and upstarts. The future of news in India lies in this competitive churning.
While much of the public debate surrounding this competitive controversy has focused on the failures of the TV audience measurement system in India, little attention has been paid to the values that will matter for the future of news. Most of the issues with the current TV rating agency, BARC, stem from a flawed understanding of the underlying statistics and a competitive culture that has seen both incumbents and upstarts to manipulate measuring system. While the current sample-based method for TV ratings is suitable for estimating the habitual viewing behavior of general entertainment, it is not suitable for objectively measuring viewership of specific events at a time, unless they Don’t have mass watching events like live sports.
Alternatives to sample-based measurements that are based on census-wide or big data approaches, such as “return path data”, have significant technical and cost constraints before industry-wide adoption is possible in a country like India. Solving the measurement problems facing TV news requires disruptive innovations that use sensors on ubiquitously available smartphones at low cost to objectively measure viewership in a census-wide manner similar to Internet streaming. can be taken advantage of creatively. Achieving industry-wide consensus on such innovations would require the various stakeholders to overcome mutual mistrust in the overall interest of the industry.
The first step towards such confidence-building would be to avoid the use of for industry Landing Page To artificially increase the number of viewers. The use of landing pages has acquired such an absurdity that a news channel is claiming more reach than popular entertainment channels. While there is a demand for an audience measurement system to remedy this, it would be unwise to burden algorithms to tell natural biological audiences from such fake ones. As an alternative, a regulatory intervention could address this issue by mandating only platform services to be used as landing pages. Such a condition shall ensure that the Platforms can monetize landing pages for marketing and promotion without tampering with the integrity of the organic viewership of television channels.
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trust and cooperation
The future of news lies in creative content formats such as short videos and pricing innovation leveraging the digitization of payments through UPI. The use of disruptive technologies such as sensors, AI and direct-to-mobile to broadcast over 5G will be a key difference in 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 radio and TV arms of a technologically challenged public broadcaster, Doordarshan and All India Radio, remain today. highly reliable source News in India.
While upstarts and incumbents capture the short-term attention of audiences across India in a highly competitive media landscape, in the long run the winners will be those who inspire trust and confidence within the audience. However, to overcome the existential issues facing the industry, both incumbents and upstarts will need 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 the former CEO of India’s public service broadcaster Prasar Bharati. He tweeted @shashidigital. Thoughts are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)