Did Times Global Broadcasting make a strategic mistake by not investing in the Direct-to-Home (DTH) platforms for distributing its business channel ET NOW? Should it have been on Tata Sky? (To be fair, ET NOW is available on Bharti’s DTH platform which has signed up about a million subscribers.)

This is not a free campaign for Tata Sky, but the issue of ET NOW’s distribution (or lack of it) is currently being discussed among television industry professionals. Let’s look at it this way: Tata Sky, viewed as a premium brand, is used\seen by consumers who matter (read the top-end customers including company heads and media planners who take a call on advertising spends). To be sure, the platform has 3.7 million customers. Of these, 70 per cent are in the SEC A category. It is fair to assume that an English language business channel would target that community. Interestingly, in case of business channels, the viewer is also the advertiser.

So would it have made more sense for ET NOW to have launched on Tata Sky first rather than spend crores of rupees (estimates oscillate between Rs 60 and Rs 90 crore) on India’s cable TV networks? After all, beaming the channel via Tata Sky would have been cheaper (any where between Rs 5 crore and Rs 8 crore a year) and it would have been seen in the right circles.
Today the channel is suffering from poor distribution, and, therefore, low viewership, even though Times Global CEO Chintamani Rao claims that the channel is widely available in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and the entire state of Gujarat. However, TAM data for television viewership of English business news channels between July 5 and July 11 do not back that claim. ET NOW’s share among English business news channels was the lowest at 6 per cent which was less than UTVi’s 9 per cent, NDTV Profit’s 14 per cent and CNBC TV18’s mammoth 72 per cent during that week.

There could be many reasons why ET NOW is not on Tata Sky. May be Tata Sky has asked for too much money as carriage fee. Or, as somebody at the DTH company said the other day, it genuinely does not have enough bandwidth to accommodate so many channels. And that it needs to be “fussy” and “choosy” about the new channels it wants to add. They have to make good business sense.

A broadcast industry expert in Mumbai, who is upset about not being able to watch ET NOW at home, however, feels that it could ET NOW’s deliberate strategy: it probably wanted to make the channel popular by taking the cable network route first and generate consumer demand which would then force the DTH companies to accept the channel for free. Of course, in a private conversation Times Global’s Rao said there is no deliberate strategy in not being on most of the DTH platforms including Tata Sky. “These are operational issues and negotiations with the DTH players are on,” he said.

It is probably then a case of who blinks first.

For the last few months, the spotlight has been on India’s top three Hindi general entertainment channels Star Plus, Colors and Zee playing musical chairs for the number one slot. Colors was the leader last week only to be overthrown by Star Plus in Week 28. In its pre-occupation with the intriguing leadership battle, the media industry seems to have ignored the one player which has quietly inched its way up the GRP charts. NDTV Imagine, which toppled Sony some time back to settle down as the number four player in the Hindi GEC category, has improved its viewership further in the last couple of weeks thanks to “item girl” Rakhi Sawant’s reality show Rakhi Ka Swyamvar.

Rakhi Ka Swyamvar – where she is supposed to choose her life-partner — opened with a TRP of 3 plus which is creditable in today’s fragmented cable and satellite TV market. And even though its popularity dipped subsequently, the show still managed an average weekly TRP of 2.3, according to TAM’s latest data. The channel executives are clearly not complaining. The buzz that Rakhi’s show created, drew new viewers to NDTV Imagine, boosting its reach by 20 per cent. Reach, in television viewership measurement jargon, is the percentage of people of a particular universe (in this case the Hindi Speaking Market) who have viewed the channel for at least a minute.

This additional reach (which is now 48 per cent and still low compared to 64 per cent for Colors and 60 per cent for Star Plus) will benefit its other shows, the channel executives feel.

The good news is that other than reality TV, the channel’s fiction shows like Bandini and Jyoti are also working. It usually augurs well for a Hindi GEC when its fiction starts delivering since nearly 70 per cent of the total TV content in the genre is fiction followed by non-fiction or reality shows and films. Its top two shows Bandini and Jyoti are also delivering an average TRP or 2. In the last five months, the channel has built its GRP from 70 to 126 now. The target is to touch 200 in the next few months, according to a senior NDTV Imagine executive.

It may be an ambitious target, but with another new show called Meera to be launched soon followed by a couple of fresh soaps, the channel is ready to give a spirited fight. And once it grabs the eyeballs, advertisers will follow. Sudha Natarajan, who is the COO of the Lintas Media Group, says that big advertisers look for reach but since they find it expensive to buy all three top channels, they spend on the top two and flank it with the number four or five player.

What’s probably also propping up the channel’s morale is the fact that NBC Universal’s team is currently in India taking an operational review of NDTV Imagine and NDTV Networks in which it had picked a 26 per cent stake for $ 150 million. The buzz is that instead of pulling out of the deal, as it was rumoured earlier, it is ready to back the venture whole-heartedly. And, may even increase its stake.