CHENNAI: With the third season of the International League T20, which is scheduled to be played in January 2025, a top official of the broadcasters said that they will be focusing on the viewership base in South India for the growth of the league.
The official broadcaster of the league have decided to telecast it on their 15 linear channels, of which about five-six are from the southern part of the country. In a conversation with this daily on Friday, Ashish Sehgal, Head of the Integrated Advertisement Revenue, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd, said that South India becomes prominent in their strategy with the linear television viewership the region boasts. He also gives insight into how TV viewership is still the medium of choice in South India.
"While there is a penetration of mobile phones, people want to watch content on the go, etc., still the content being watched on TV is higher and the penetration of it is higher in this part of the country, which helps any content to reach mass at one go. Digital does not help you to reach mass immediately. I feel that the penetration of any content in the South will be far greater because of TV being a medium. Though in the first two seasons we have seen good results, specifically for ILT20, if I just say any content I have to put, which is why South is becoming more important," Sehgal told this daily.
He believes that having a stand alone window and the fact that it is happening at the start of the year helps garner more interest from the players as well. "What happens is the players playing in this league are all international players, for them it becomes a window to be selected in other leagues and specifically IPL and some of their own country leagues etc. So they can garner higher pricing if they are playing well in this league," he said.
The broadcaster was set to merge with Sony Pictures Networks India (Sony Pictures) but the deal fell through this year, and had entered into a four-year deal with Disney Star for TV broadcasting rights of certain ICC events through the 2024-27 cycle. However, in the end, that did not happen either. Sehgal, while acknowledging that the situation would have been different had the merger happened, explained how they have moved on and are bouncing back stronger.
"The mindset which we have is that at lower cost, we can still create high quality content and make more money out of it. We work very diligently on those formulas. While we look at the cost being reduced, we don't compromise on quality for that. Yeah. It is more about stretching talents whether it's an outside producer who's doing it for us or our in-house talent which is working, even our sales teams, to that fact everybody is working extra hard to build the overall company back. We are competing with very big fishes today, with the Disney-Reliance merger happening. There will be a formidable competition in the country. We don't have money like Sony backing us. So, everything has to be an in-house product. We are very conscious of that fact."
"We know the intrinsic value of this company because our earlier chairman's vision, Mr. Subhash Chandra, of creating channels or content opportunities in every regional language is reaping benefits to us. I am telling you today, the South is becoming prominent and had we not invested in the South thinking that 'Sun (Sun Network) is the king of South, let's not enter there' and it's not that we weren't burning money for many years in this market. But we continued to invest and that is today giving us that result. The contribution over our total revenue buys more from the South now. South has become the mainstay of broadcast business also."