Sanjay Raina

 

In an exclusive interview with Vijaya Cherian, Sanjay Raina, newly-appointed COO of Taj TV talks about his role, sports rights, the power of HD and what makes pay TV tick

What will your new role entail?

It’s a mixed bag really. I will be handling the operations at Taj TV, which presently has about 130 people working in various disciplines including production, packaging and promos, technical operations and so on.

 The facilities we have here are for both broadcast and playout operations. We currently play out 10 channels, which is primarily for India, Pakistan, the Middle East and Singapore. We also produce and play out channels for clients in Hong Kong.

Although we are a broadcaster, we help produce content for some channels. For instance, we have a deal with Astro in Malaysia, whereby, we provide cricket content, for which we have rights.

We also have three sports channels — Ten Sports, Ten Action and Ten Cricket. Taj TV has the rights from the cricket boards of five different countries including Pakistan, West Indies, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and South Africa presently. Those rights could be national or international limited rights depending on the contracts for each board. Those are shown on Ten Cricket.

I also look after Pakistan, which is a very important market for us.

Thirdly, my role is to look after the international revenue that comes through syndication and affiliate sales. That’s a sizeable chunk of our revenue. We have deals as far as Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia.

Did Taj TV suffer a setback when Peter Hutton left?

I don’t think so. In corporate life, people come and people go but business goes on. Every business is driven by common sense and hard work.

How did you come to be in TV? What’s your background?

I am an engineer and did my MBA after that. I worked with Philips for six years. In 1998, I was bitten by the bug of entertainment and joined Columbia Tristar in India. We had a joint venture deal with Disney in those days so I looked after the theatrical distribution of their films.

Later on, I joined Discovery Channel and launched Animal Planet in India. From there, I moved over to Hindustan Times for four years. My last job in India was with Times Now. I was part of the launch team.

In 2005, I went to Indonesia to set up a kid’s channel for Astro, which is a pay TV operator. Astro recently moved its operations from Indonesia to Malaysia. I was the Head of Marketing for Astro and helped set it up in Malaysia. Early this year, I joined Taj TV as COO.

So what’s my background? A mix of consumer durables, paid TV, newspapers and so on.

Why did you decide to come here?

The role was challenging. Malaysia is beautiful and colourful and it was easy to choose to continue there. The role was very critical in determining my coming to Dubai. This is an extremely challenging role and I don’t say that because it’s the thing to say. More and more, as I sit on this seat, I become aware of how varied my role is from looking at everything from production to legal to finance to packaging to delivering revenue to looking after Pakistan. It’s a very meaty and challenging role.

What would you look to improve here?

Some of the people here have been here since the day Taj TV began and I believe they know how to do their job well. We could streamline our operations a bit and make things more professional.

How important are sports rights for a broadcaster like Taj TV?

Sport is a very strange business. In the sports business, you are only as good as the rights you have.

People will only watch you for what you have in terms of content and that is specifically driven by the content that works in that particular country. It’s not like a soap or drama which has international appeal.

Cricket works in one part of the world; football works across the world; golf is sporadic and F1 is very up market.

You have to constantly keep investing in those rights but you also have to see whether it makes sense to purchase those rights and whether you will be able recover that money.

Where do you see room for improving your revenue and efficiency?

India is our biggest market so we need to constantly reinvent ourselves there.

There is also lot of focus on Pakistan now and our international business. There are many companies out there who want to run channels for consumers but want to outsource the production and playout to someone else. That’s where we come in.

We have two studios on the ground floor and the first floor. We use them for our shows and also rent them out.

How do you view pay TV specifically in this market?

There’s a big gap here in the pay TV market. Its potential has not been exploited, if you ask me.

People would like to monetise their content and the best way to do it is through pay TV. It should work here; it’s just a matter of time.

The Middle East is full of expatriates who are used to pay TV back in their homes. In India, pay TV especially in the form of DTH is rising at the rate of 25 to 30%. In India now, companies are making slightly more money through DTH distribution than through analogue distribution. We are talking about 25 million STBs versus 110 million households but pay TV is giving them more money in terms of distribution revenue.

Why is there a gap here?

Traditionally, you have a lot of FTA in this market. I have worked in a similar market so I can draw a parallel. It’s typically like Indonesia, where you have about 240 million people if not more now. They have 12 national FTA channels that go across the whole country and beam all kinds of mystery content, Islamic content, dramas and soaps etc. That works very well for the TV channels there and they make a lot of money through advertising sales.

Pay TV didn’t do well there initially because people were unable to come to terms with the concept of paying for television. So when a couple of new entrants like Astro came in, we said, the best way to enter this market is to take the bull by the horns.

Spend money and create a lot of noise. Everyone said, this is not a pay TV market. We said that’s why it should work because it’s not a pay TV market and we want to create one.

Suddenly, within a span of two years, the market grew from 200,000 pay TV subscribers to about a million. And everybody grew, not just Astro.

The average pay TV revenue per user (RPU) was possibly one of the highest in that part of the world. This is not a comparison with Europe. Here, people were paying about US $24.

RPU in India is about US $4. Malaysia does about US $27 after 15 years of pay TV. Indonesia was at US $24 and we went up to 26. That was the amazing thing about pay TV, but Astro had to leave the country and the momentum finally died. Otherwise, if the tempo had been sustained, pay TV would have had at least three to four million of the 30 million households, which is about 10% of the market.

It is only when some pay TV operator in the region will invest heavily in content that it will do well. Unfortunately, in FTA, you don’t get the content you want in a psychographic or demographic manner.

What will be the big driver for pay TV?

HD. This is a big driver for both a distribution company and also for the channels. People are willing to pay a premium to watch genres like sports and real life programmes like National Geographic and Discovery Channel.

Even news in HD is stunning although that has not been explored that much.

Once you watch cricket or football in HD, you won’t be able to go back to SD.

When the India-West Indies series was played, we had a specific beam in HD which was given to all the operators in India. The World Cup for cricket was entirely available in HD and did amazing numbers for ESPN Star Sports in India.

HD is the way to go.

It’s a big incentive for pay TV operators, channel producers and broadcasters because you will have more eye balls and, therefore, revenue.

There have been rumours that you will be launching an HD channel?

Yes, we are in the process of launching an HD channel. It will be called Ten HD. We are looking at launching it in Q3 of this year. It is being played out from Dubai.

It will have a mix of everything. Whatever is available in HD, which is relevant to our audience, will be broadcast on that channel.

What is your opinion about 3D?

3D in TV is a non starter, according to me. I’m not saying 3D technology is dead. It is still evolving.

As far as the cinema business is concerned, we have seen that 3D box office appeal in America has dwindled in the last six to 12 mths. There was a big hype with 3D and then, every film today has a 3D version to it because 3D was like HD some years back.

People find the technology a bit intrusive with the ophthalmic devices, which you have to use to watch the movie. If you wear glasses, it could be a deterrent. I dread it when my kids say, we want to watch 3D.

3D technology, however, will change. It’s still in its infancy. Maybe the screen will evolve. At the last World Cup, Astro showed some of the semi finals and finals in 3D but it didn’t have too much uptake.

First you need a 3D TV, then you need five glasses if there are five people in the house and they all have to huddle together to watch it. It has its limitations.

3D is a large screen experience for now and it has a long way to go.

By comparison, HD is tapping everybody on the shoulder and saying, ‘turn me into HD because I give you better image quality and better audio’.