Essel Group Chairman Subhash Chandra has said the country’s booming start-up space is not a bubble, rather it will help expand the overall market in the coming days.
“They (start-ups) are neither a bubble nor a complete game changer. I am sure the traditional things will survive, it (start-ups) will expand the market,” Mr. Chandra said here on Thursday night at the Exchange4media Conclave.
Mr. Chandra added that when he started the country’s first satellite television channel Zee TV 23 years ago, the film and theatre industry were wary and felt that it would mark their end.
“I remember that when I started (satellite) television in this country, the film industry felt we will kill the film industry and theatre industry but the reverse happened. We promoted the films, we partnered with the movie industry and both grew. Same way the technological start-up companies will continue,” he said.
He said the e-commerce companies have found success as they are able to cater to the needs of people from smaller towns or the rural areas where products were earlier not available due to supply chain constraints.
Stating that technology will help in expanding the market and things will co-exist, he debunked the myth that linear television will cease to be around after a decade.
“People say the linear television as it exists today, 10 years from now it will be dead. At Zee, we do take technology seriously. We are ahead at least in Asia in terms of adopting technology. But I feel this (linear television) will survive but at the same time new media. It will give more opportunities to marketers and expand the market as a whole,” he said.
Essel Group is in the process of launching an English news channel and Mr. Chandra said it would be positioned as a technology company providing news.
“We are about to launch an English news channel. We were discussing the whole technological engine we are going to use.
I understood what technology my colleagues wanted to introduce in the news space.
“I said why don’t we have a vision that we are not going to be a news organisation but we are going to be a technology company incidentally giving news as a product. That is the positioning we have decided last week, for our English news channel,” he said.
He further said social media platforms such as Twitter is making the marketing job easier for news organisations as they help them to understand what people are interested in.
“Because a news is given in 140 letters on the social media, it spreads and starts trending, it gives me an indication that this is the news I must go deep into. This is the news people want to watch and want to know more details.
Today, the technology has enabled to give the news in many more ways and many different packages.
A news which I would put on my DNA newspaper, which might be almost 5,000 words in a large analytical, but the same news I will break into pieces for TV, for online, mobile and so on so forth,” he said.
He said the group is moving towards cognitive entertainment.
“Strategically, we are certainly moving towards the cognitive entertainment in this country, from Asia. There is nobody in Asia who is having content creation involving this space,” he said, adding that only four companies in the world are doing it at present, who are all from the U.S. “In terms of other technology and distribution, there is so much to do but I feel that this is, for media and entertainment world, this is 2.0 (second generation) in the happening, with the digital world, the content being created and the mindset being changed,” he added.
