Premium content production needs to be democratised

Over 13 years, UDAY SHANKAR took Star India from ₹1,600 crore to ₹18,000 crore in revenue when he quit in 2020. He was keen to focus on education and healthcare. But here he is back in media four years later as vice-chairperson of JioStar. The ₹26,000 crore (revenue FY24) firm is India's largest media company. It is the product of the merger between Viacom18 Media and Star India. Viacom18 is owned by Reliance Industries (RIL) and Bodhi Tree Systems, a platform owned equally by Shankar and James Murdoch's Lupa Systems. Star India is a part of The Walt Disney Company. Earlier this week, Vanita Kohli-Khandekar had a chat with Shankar in Mumbai. Edited excerpts:

- UDAY SHANKAR

What are your priorities with JioStar? We deliver the largest share of audiences on TV (110 channels such as Colors and Star Plus, 32 per cent viewership) and digital (Disney+Hotstar and JioCinema offer the second-largest audience after YouTube) every day. There are a lot of things that are working very well and my topmost priority is to not spoil them.

But in a country with 800-850 million mobile customers, if you (the whole streaming business) have 50-70 million subscribers, then there is a whole world to cover over there. Also, streaming content is still designed for a very elite segment. In a country of 1.5 billion people, if several hundred million people are not coming to your platform every night, then there is a problem. I'm not talking about Instagram, YouTube, and Google but the other premium services. It's a huge opportunity that needs creativity and technological innovation.

Finally, there is a narrative that has got built and accepted that TV is dead. It has become self-fulfilling. Every day you say it's dead and you don't feed it. And since you don't feed it, it is going to die.