Two Decades of Liberalization: Media Brands Zee & Star
The year 1991 was momentous in more ways than one. It began with the Gulf War (January 16) and ended with the official fall of the Communist Soviet Republic (December 25). Also in that year, STAR was launched as Asia’s first multi-channel satellite TV broadcaster, CNN burst on the global scene with its Gulf War Coverage, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated…and in July, then Finance Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh unveiled a slew of economic reforms that set India on the course to liberalization.
STAR – Satellite Television Asian Region – started broadcasting five television channels on 1 January 1991 from the AsiaSat1 Satellite, on a Northern & Southern Beam. The channels were Star Plus, BBC, Prime Sports, MTV and Star Chinese Channel. It was our first taste of satellite television. And it was to completely revolutionize our lives. In less than a month, almost on cue, war broke out.
The first Gulf War became a watershed event for television and for CNN, a first of its kind global news channel that took the US by storm. For Asia, it simply leapfrogged us into the future. The moment when the bombing began – on January 16, 1991 – was announced on CNN and India was watching with the rest of the world, albeit a very tiny percentage of people who had access to ‘cable tv’.
Liberalization meant different things to different industries but for the electronic media, it opened the skies, literally. Until then, India was subject to the school-masterly hegemony of Doordarshan and a super dominant Print Media as the only sources of Information and Entertainment. Commercial Internet was not born yet, nor was mobile telephony. Entertainment was Movies in theatres, the once a week song compilation called Chitrahaar, the Sunday evening Hindi Feature Film and other shows on DD. To be fair, DD did produce some of India’s finest dramas, comedies, news and current affairs shows in the early days – but it remained a single channel, state run broadcaster with an air of seriousness and social responsibility.
Suddenly with the open skies policy, it didn’t just rain, it poured. An amazingly entrepreneurial breed of the now much maligned ‘cable operator’ flung wires over buildings and created a brand new media business. The first credit of the Satellite revolution must go to them. The great Indian television industry has been built on the efforts of those first buccaneering pioneers. With little regulation and no precedent, Cable Television grew to feed a frenzied consumer demand for more.
Sensing this demand and deftly acting on it, Zee TV, founded by Subhash Chandra was launched in India on 1 October 1992, becoming the first Hindi satellite channel (and like Zee in the North, Sun TV grew to become the outstanding media brand in the South).
Zee launched riding on the shoulders of Amitabh Bachchan who had conveniently ridden off into the sunset in 1991 (in an ironic twist, it was also Bachchan who was responsible for the fall of Zee ten years later) – and Zee played all his and other Hindi movies, songs & scenes repeatedly. For an audience bred on DD, it was like letting a kid loose in candy store. 24 hours of entertainment, 7 days a week – even of it wasn’t the best original entertainment, it was freely available – liberalized entertainment. And the quality and quantity of the offering rapidly changed…very quickly, Zee TV’s entertainment offering included some memorable dramas, comedies, game shows and a whole slew of reruns of the best shows from yesteryear DD! Again, the television business was fortunate to have in the 80 year old film industry a ready pool of technical & creative talent to tap into, creating a new television production industry.
With Zee leading the charge, electronic media grew exponentially to completely overwhelm the Indian Audience. Not just Zee & local language programming, even the international content found incredible traction among the first converts. Santa Barbara, MTV, 24 Hour News from BBC & CNN added to the heady mix and the number of channels mushroomed. Cable & Satellite Television grew to 150 channels reaching 25 million homes by the year 2000.
Cable &Satellite Television opened new advertising avenues for companies so far restricted to Print & DD. It democratized information by eroding the need for literacy. It opened a window to the world for the Indian Consumer by bringing into their living rooms the very best of global and modern Indian television programming. It created a surge in television set sales, and interestingly, added fuel to the fire of the economic liberalization policies by providing an advertising platform for the hundreds of new brands that launched across product categories. Soon it was closely snapping on the heels of the print industry.
Among all the media brands, the first decade of economic liberalization clearly belonged to Zee TV. By end of the decade, Zee reached its zenith. In January 2000, riding high on the overhyped media stocks and the dot com boom, Zee became India’s most valued company – ahead of traditional old world industries like Reliance and Tata, and Mr. Chandra the richest Indian in the world. It had been an incredible 10 years for Indian Media and Indian Economic freedom.
STAR was founded by Richard Li, the young son of Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka Shing, with the vision of connecting a disparate Asia with a unifying English language international service. A great starting point, it established STAR as the premier television brand in Asia…but STAR was destined to achieve spectacular success with another man’s vision. In 1993 Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation purchased 63.6% of STAR for over $500 million, followed quickly by a complete buy-out. From here on, Star TV’s pan-Asian English service quickly evolved into a slew of national and regional channels straddling genres from entertainment, movies, sports, music & news. Mr. Murdoch understood very early on that there was no such thing as ‘pan-Asia’ and that the future lay in localization.
If the first decade of liberalization belonged to Zee, then the second decade clearly belonged to Star Plus. After spending the better part of the 90’s in building a network of top quality international channels – Star Movies, Channel V, Star World, and a robust revenue collection machinery in the form of advertising sales & distribution – Star had not seen as much success in the giant local language Hindi market. To be fair, Star already had a JV with Zee, so in a manner of speaking Star was master of both Hindi & International, but that wasn’t the way the world saw it. The relationship between the partners was fractious to say the least, and finally Star & Zee split ways in January 2000. It was to be a momentous separation.
Now freed from the shackles of the JV agreement, Star Plus, the flagship Hindi service proceeded to unleash a brand new programming strategy at the start of the new millennium – that ironically took India back in time with a liberal dose of tradition & good family values. Kaun Banega Crorepati that heralded the return of the Amitabh Bachchan to superstardom and a slew of daily soap operas – the famous K Series – took India by storm. KBC’s impact was immediate and overpowering. Overnight, in the month of July 2000, Star Plus went from a distant 3rd in the ratings race to an absolute No.1 – a position that it retained unchallenged for 8 years, and apart from a minor hiccup, does so even today. Star Plus became the Gold Standard for entertainment and millions of homes across India lived out their daily routines to the programming schedule of India’s No.1 Hindi General Entertainment Channel.
Not just Star Plus, all of Star’s content creation broke new ground in creative excellence. Reality shows, game shows, high-end drama, action and comedies all raised the bar in programming quality – and set the new benchmark for the television industry. Amitabh Bachchan’s incredible success also legitimatized the small screen and paved the way for every single Bollywood star to appear on television.
In the ensuing decade, television overtook print to become the largest sector of the media industry. Now with Star leading the charge, the Cable & Satellite Industry grew even faster. Even as Analogue Cable Systems continued to spread, DTH saw the rise of an alternative means of content delivery to consumer homes. Numerous new channels were launched. In the middle of the decade, mobile telephony took off. New consumer brands continued to be launched and by 2010, C&S television boasted over 500 channels reaching nearly 100 million homes. Riding this giant wave, news, movies and sports also grew exponentially using the ever-expanding reach and power of television.
As we enter our third decade of economic reform and liberalization, the media sector is dominated by a few key print and television players. Star and Zee feature at the very top of the list. These two brands are household names, even as they remain the key medium to enable hundreds of other brands reach and connect with the Indian consumer. They have spread into languages, genres, geographies and technologies – they are omnipresent in our lives and influence us in more ways we can imagine.
SAMEER NAIR 