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Editorial: Digital Dividend

Digital media and digitisation will lead the media sector’s growth

The outlook for India’s media and entertainment (M&E) sector over the next five years is optimistic, a new KPMG-Ficci report has found?the industry is on course for a CAGR of 14.2% in the 2013-2018 period, nearly doubling in size to being a R1,786 billion one from its 2013 size of R918 billion. Much of this growth will ride on the back of digital media and digitisation in the traditional media.

TV’s digitisation is yet to pay off; the anticipated rise in ARPU and subscription revenues from the Phase I and Phase II roll-outs of the Digital Acess System will materialise only when broadcasters switch from being B2B businesses to being B2C ones. But, given that this shift is likely to happen soon and that the Phase III roll-out will further expand the base for realisation of increased ARPUs, TV should be able to shake off its slack. The report projects TV to reach a size of R885 billion in 2018, more than double its 2013 size of R417 billion. The film sub-sector is similarly set to benefit hugely from digitisation as newer revenue opportunities, viz. from video-on-demand and streaming websites open up. The digital medium itself would see a CAGR of 27.2% between 2013 and 2018, the highest among all sub-sectors. The medium’s smaller user/subscriber base?compared to TV, print, etc?could be behind the high growth figure, but the appetite for it among consumers is also voracious. By 2018, the number of internet users would have increased to 494 million from the 214 million in 2013, pushed by data services on the mobile platform?in the same period, from 130 million users of mobile internet, the figure would have risen to 353 million. Even though print in India continues to buck the slowdown the medium is facing globally, it is in keeping with the projected growth of the digital media that most newspapers and magazines also have an online avatar.

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First published on: 18-03-2014 at 01:56 IST
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