Peter Mukherjea Speech Summary in my words at TiE ISB Connect 2006

Peter Mukherjea, CEO, STAR group, was at ISB for the TiE – ISB Connect event to share his views on “Discovery of New Media Opportunities, blending technologies and leveraging India”.

He started off saying that “convergence” is the key to opportunities in the Media industry. Customers these days have all means available to them to check on the media of today. Be it mobiles or internet or television or radio or wired cars or wired planes, each customer has it at his disposal to make use of it. Thus, it is up to the every media company to find answer to the questions like “Who? What? When? How much?”. It is the answer to these questions which will help strategize moves to capture the market.

He claimed that the new media industry is moving towards a tipping point and we can safely assume to have hit it when even the lower class of the society will be having a means to watch TV shows on their mobiles. After all this said and done, it’s a fact that television still holds its current place with increased choice and complete control.

Mr. Mukherjea supported interactive marketing to be the jargon of the day with more and more people preferring to choose what they want rather than taking what is given to them. Interactive television includes shopping of related products (like DVDs) while you are watching a show and also gives you the power to control it in different ways.

He threw some light on the market size of the media industry and also showed some figures predicted for 2010. As per the analysis, the current media industry (including Television, Print, Internet and Others) has a market size of USD 1000 billion and its going to touch USD 1450 billion in 2010. In the segregation of the pie, Television will continue to have the same share but the Print media might loose some of its share to Internet.

Coming to the next point in the agenda of where India stands today in the Media industry, Mr Mukherjea educated the audience by telling that it has the third largest TV industry with 112 million viewer households after USA and China. He also pointed out one of the pain areas for broadcasters that they get just 14% of the revenue generated, which was because of under reporting on behalf of the Local Cable Operators.

He also shared some more facts on the advertising revenue of the Television Media industry. Total advertising expense in 2005 was USD 2.79 billion of which Television advertising expense contributed to about USD 1.15 billion. This revenue is growing steadily at the rate of 14% year on year. Having said this, India still lags behind its counterparts (other Asian countries like China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand etc.) in this stream of revenue. He also pointed out the fact that the number of television channels are increasing at an alarming rate and we might end up having 1000 channels by 2010.

With all this about the television industry in India, our presence on the Internet has not been lagging far behind and has lot of potential which will become obvious in coming years.

Mr. Mukherjea also brought out other pain areas for the broadcasters as he cited examples of mandatory sharing of sports broadcasts along with content regulation and reduced advertising time being enforced on them. Also level playing field is not available, with regulation on different levels of investment allowed for FDIs in different sectors with in the Media industry.

As the TiE-ISB Connect was an event designed especially for bringing budding entrepreneurs and VCs together, Mr. Mukherjea did not leave out on telling the audience about the opportunities available in the Media Industry. Analog transmissions are giving way to Digital equipments with more investments coming in. Also there is a steady increase in the market for original specialized content creation for TV shows on niche fields like golf, gardening, weather etc. Apart from these, there is an emerging market for new media like mobile etc.

To conclude the plenary speech, Mr. Mukherjea let the audience know about the forthcoming targets for the STAR group as a part of their growth plans. STAR group, amongst other plans, would continue to concentrate on the Television media along with Broadband Wireless, Movies on a pay per view basis, DTH (Direct to Home), Network (distribution of new channels) and also tapping the regional channel market to provide a complete bouquet of services to its customers.

Posted by Mahesh Shenoy