Bloomberg TV’s Third India Outing

The news media business is an addictive game. Despite financial reverses and an atmosphere of political skulduggery, some keep returning to a losing proposition. Media watchers thought that after being forced out of Network18 by Reliance Industries (RIL), Raghav Bahl would have stuck to the more futuristic and reliable digital business he launched in the form of the news portal Quint. But no, broadcasting has a romance the old guard wants to return to.

For Bloomberg TV, through which Bahl will make his re-entry into broadcasting, it will be ironically its third outing in India. The first two rounds have been disasters. Bloomberg first came on board with the Ronnie Screwvala-promoted UTVi in 2009 as the Bloomberg UTV business channel. It limped along till UTV finally exited in 2012 in favour of Reliance ADA’s Business Broadcast News. It was rebranded Bloomberg TV India, but in ratings there was no progress.

Meanwhile, the Anil Ambani Group has been steadily pulling out from its media businesses. It is now the turn of the Bloomberg channel. A couple of weeks ago came the announcement that Reliance ADA and Bloomberg would go their own way from 1 April. Though the official position is Reliance ADA will rebrand its channel and keep going, it is unlikely to sink more money on a listing ship.

Bloomberg, on the other hand, has secured itself. It partnered neither UTV nor Reliance ADA; it merely lent its brand name for a fee. An ex-editor of Bloomberg TV told this writer the deal was in the region of 20 per cent of revenue! It will be the same for Raghav Bahl. The risk will be all his.

Be it as it may, for business journalism, sweltering in the doldrums, all this means a taste of happy times again! Senthil Chengalvarayan, former editor-in-chief of Network18’s business division, who stepped down in September last year after the Mukesh Ambani takeover, may be going to the ‘new project’. A couple of CNBC anchors, too, have put in their papers. Expectedly, this has triggered a merry-go-round. Head of Network18’s news operations, Rahul Joshi, is refurbishing his forces by dipping into his old alma mater, The Economic Times.

But is it an astute move to come back to business news broadcasting when there are three entrenched players — CNBC, ET Now and NDTV Profit — in a television universe where English business news perhaps accounts for less than 0.1 per cent of viewership? More important, what is the future when upper income consumers are moving to smartphones for their daily fix of news?

A report by the mobile analytics company Flurry in September last year showed that for the first time in the US, the time spent inside mobile applications by the average US consumer exceeded that of TV. The average US consumer is now spending 198 minutes per day inside apps compared to 168 minutes on TV.
For the developed world, television is already ‘legacy’ media. A Pew Research ‘State of the Media 2015’ report said that while newspaper daily and weekend circulation fell 3 per cent in the US in 2014 (down 19 per cent since 2004), cable news prime time viewership of the big channels — Fox News, MSNBC and CNN — fell a humongous 8 per cent over the previous year.

While in India, television broadcasting, especially entertainment TV, still has years of growth with large swathes of the hinterland still to be covered, business news consumers and the ‘smartphone’ generation are already moving the other way. Isn’t that the market Bahl wants to tap?

Bloomberg-Quint TV will have an app option too; but why then put money on an expensive option that is fading away? Apple CEO Tim Cook said: “Over 60 per cent of paid TV consuming is done through an Apple device. When you experience TV through an app, you realise how much better it can be.”