The Television Transition | Rohit Raj at SIMClairvoyance 2011

Rohit Raj, Founder, Glitch and a Symbiosis Institute of Media and Communication alumnus. Mr Rohit Raj took the students through the topic of Transition from Stay at home TV to interactive. He first primarily gave a brief background as to how television as a medium evolved in India. Well going back in the 1980’s, Television was a luxury to have at home. As a kid Mr Rohit Raj remembers only having 4 hour of broadcasting on TV and comparing to the present age he is astonished as to how can all the networks combined present 800 hrs of content in a 24hrs time frame!

The 80’s was an era of loyal audiences as it had only 4 channels running on the TV, then in the 90’s came the surge of Channels creating the era of ‘Fight for the remote’. Thus with the opening of the economy came the globalization stage along with slow growing internet. In the present scenario getting consumer mind space is increasingly becoming difficult as the audience is moving on to the internet. This shift is attributed to India’s booming economy, due to which the traditional job structure has changed from 9-5 to no specific time for working hours and shifts for various call centers. Thus people have no time to sit and engage themselves with TV instead they moved on to downloading whatever content they want from the internet.

Social media is increasingly become the medium to communicate and the marketers are in a panic attack phase as they spend huge amounts on advertising more so on the Television. The shift is making them jittery about using the television medium for reaching out to their target audience. There is a constant fight among various brands to capture the right audience and promote their brands on Television. However, the TV watching audience has moved from the SEC A section to SEC B and Rural audience. TV content has become more reality based and shows have become less as the audiences wants voyeurism.

The only silver lining is that India is a Cricket crazy country and  it gets the maximum TRP's. However now the challenge lies in the hands of the TV networks as they have to produce content that would not only get the city audiences hooked but also the Sec B and the Rural areas.

(with inputs from Gauri Gupte, MBA 2013)