The India heads of a number of the world’s prime media teams outlined their development plans for the market on the Mumbai’s FICCI Frames media convention.

The convention is organized by the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Business (FICCI). Kevin Vaz, chair, FICCI media and leisure committee and CEO, broadcast leisure, Viacom18, pressured the significance of sports activities within the Indian market at a panel on navigating the way forward for the media and leisure business. Streamer JioCinema is a subsidiary of Viacom18. The corporate gained the rights for the immensely well-liked Indian Premier League cricket match in 2022 and streamed it free on JioCinema in 2023, profitable thousands and thousands of eyeballs from then rival Disney+ Hotstar within the course of.

“Cricket is without doubt one of the greatest attain drivers on this nation. It’s the one piece of content material that works throughout the size and breadth of this nation, and advertisers worth this as a result of they’ll get on the spot attain, they’ll attain shoppers within the north and the south with their message on the identical time, and they’re able to pay the worth for this sort of content material,” Vaz mentioned. “It is sensible to have sport in entrance of the paywall. When sports activities has such a attain, it’s not excellent for us to attempt to restrict that attain when there are folks keen to observe it.”

Sandhya Devanathan, co-chair FICCI media and leisure committee, and VP and head, Meta India, outlined the three key priorities for the corporate – utilizing AI to create higher returns for advertisers and in addition for customers to have extra participating experiences; improve Reels, the favored quick type video format, which is an enormous development driver on the platform, each by way of person engagement and the way companies are utilizing it; and in addition enterprise messaging, with 60% of Indians utilizing WhatsApp.

Arjun Nohwar, co-chair FICCI media and leisure committee and senior VP and common supervisor – India and South Asia, Warner Bros. Discovery, mentioned, “Success goes to be predicated on having a deep understanding of fixing shopper preferences, figuring out who the client is, after which having the ability to tailor-make a chunk of content material or story arcs which can be related to them, that delight and encourage them, and so they discover endearing.”

Addressing the truth that most Indians now watch content material on their telephones, Nohwar added: “The brand new dynamic that’s rising is for us to deal with ‘when’ and historically linear community tv didn’t deal with that. By ‘when’ I imply, there are consumption moments which can be occurring whilst you’re ready in your flight to board, whilst you’re in an elevator going up 30 tales whilst you’re ready to choose up your little one from faculty. And in these moments from 30 seconds to most likely 5 or 6 minutes, do you have got a type issue that’s participating that’s not simply person generated? So, it’s going to be essential for networks to consider making derivatives out of their conventional content material. And determining how do you create moments of reality with shoppers which can be more and more used now to watching content material on completely different platforms and tv and make content material that’s related to them in these bite-sized, snackable moments. Perhaps that additionally wants a crumb path again to them, for them to come back again onto linear tv, to observe 24-minute, 50-minute episodic reveals.”

Sushant Sreeram, nation head, Amazon Prime Video mentioned that the service gives SVOD, TVOD and by way of the Channels possibility, a spread of some 20 different content material choices from throughout India and the world. “After we take into consideration methods to serve India, the underpinning that we return to is prospects will at all times worth nice worth, nice choice and comfort,” Sreeram mentioned.