Chris Forrester, on 17-09-2008
Link Disney with India’s UTV, or Time Warner with MidiTech, NBC-Universal with NDTV and Viacom with Network 18 and you have just a small sample of Hollywood’s rush to secure Indian business partners. The list is very long, with News Corp already very active in India with Star Group as well as Tata-Sky, and players like the BBC, National Geographic and Discovery all producing locally.

“Tune into India’s entertainment economy, the fastest growing such economy in the world,” invited Farokh Balsara, leader of Ernst & Young’s media & entertainment practice for India. “We’re achieving 7%-8% growth, and from now to 2015 we are predicting India will typically enjoy about 7% real GDP per annum.”

Balsara told IBC delegates that some 6m people work in the sector, with 100,000 working in post-production and special effects. “The market is already there.”

Balsara was chairing IBC’s India panel, in particular examining the growth possibilities in film, TV, music, animation and post-production. “Entertainment spend in India has doubled in just two years. We have 67% of our population below 35 years-of-age. And we have 150m people speaking English.” Balsara said the Indian entertainment market was worth about $12.6bn – “but there’s another $4bn lost through piracy,” he added.

He explained that challenges remained, listing them as a lack of uniform foreign investment, and with far too many overlapping regulatory bodies. For cinema there were huge inefficiencies in distribution while low PC ownership and broadband connectivity limited growth in that sector.

Namit Malhotra, MD at Prime Focus India (which has recently acquired some high-profile names such as Clear, VTR, Frantic Films and Post Logic) and is now India’s largest post-production and video effects company, said India had suffered a lag in acquiring new technology for production. “But this is changing rapidly. We concentrated on making sure we could bridge these technology gaps with the latest developments, cameras and high-end motion control equipment. We are now educating film and TV production creatives in these new areas. HDTV is about to happen because at the end of the day the top TV channels are looking for differentiation in a very crowded market.”

Source: Rapid TV News 2008

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