Murdoch partner helps Ambani build a media empire

By Sohee Kim and P R Sanjai

On a breezy April evening some 45,000 Indian Premier League cricket fans are packed into Wankhede Stadium to watch the hometown Mumbai Indians battle the Rajasthan Royals.

Elsewhere in the city, hundreds of employees of Viacom18 Media Pvt. are on different mission, transmitting the match in 12 languages and 20 camera angles across the world’s most-populous country.

“We are targeting over 600 million people to come and watch,” said Uday Shankar, the executive behind the effort.

Once an underdog dwarfed by foreign behemoths, Viacom18 and its JioCinema streaming service are poised to become the most powerful player in the $28 billion (Rs 2.3 lakh crores) Indian media and entertainment industry. Reliance Industries Ltd., Viacom18’s largest shareholder, has plans to merge the business with Walt Disney Co.’s India operations, adding dozens of cable TV channels and tens of millions of streaming subscribers in a deal valuing the combined enterprise at $8.5 billion (Rs 71,063 cores).

With everything from local news to big Hollywood films, the new company aims to capture not just a bigger share of TV ad sales, but the growing digital revenue now going to tech giants like YouTube and Meta Platforms Inc. Viacom18 could also become a broader rival to Amazon.com Inc. if it follows through on plans to integrate e-commerce into its streaming platform.

Shankar, the 61-year-old executive who’s going to lead Viacom18 as vice chairman, is a media veteran. A former journalist, he helped turn Star India into a prized asset for the Murdoch family, which then sold their entertainment assets to Disney in 2019. Now he’s overseeing the group buying back that business. His role as a bridge between Hollywood and Bollywood will make him a key player in the media strategy being implemented by Reliance, a company with interests from energy to telecommunications.

“He’s one of the most talented media executives in the world, not just in India,” said James Murdoch, who partnered with Shankar in Bodhi Tree Systems, an investment firm that owns a piece of Viacom18. “Uday has a great track record of being able to move businesses forward, and we’re excited to see it continue.”

India isn’t a market where others have been able to move forward so easily, despite the country’s economic growth.

Disney, for example, acquired a large business there when it bought 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets in 2019. But pricey bidding wars for cricket rights and a paltry $1.28-a-month in revenue per streaming subscriber has made profitability hard to come by. In a bid to bulk up, Sony Group sought to merge its Indian business with local rival Zee Entertainment, only to see the deal fall apart earlier this year.

With the backing of Mukesh Ambani, Reliance’s chairman and Asia’s richest person, Shankar thinks he can achieve a different outcome, building a profitable streaming business in large part by offering ad-supported programing. It helps, he said, that he was born and raised in the country.

“India is like a continent,” he said in an interview at his office in the southern port area of Mumbai. “Many people have come in and found it difficult to build a big business, but for us, we are from India.”

Among his boldest bets, letting cricket fans stream the premier league for free on JioCinema, a move that attracted 449 million viewers and more than 17 billion views last season. Shankar is offering free IPL live streaming again this year.

The goal is to develop the market for mobile streaming in India and particularly the associated advertising, since most of the company’s customers subscribe to the ad-supported version. Digital ad revenue will come not only from the English- and Hindi-speaking population, but also from regions that have their own languages and purchasing habits.

Sports streams garnered 70 per cent of their viewership from small towns last year, and most of viewers were in the 18-to-44-year-old demographic most coveted by advertisers, according to a report from the consulting firm EY. And while advertising in India’s $4 billion (Rs 33,441 crores) traditional TV market is shrinking, the digital advertising market is projected to more than double to about $20 billion (Rs 1.6 lakh crores) in the next five years, Shankar said.

“You need to make sure that digital offerings are available to smallest of the small advertisers,” he said. “That’s the model that we believe in.”

All of this takes work of course. Back at Viacom18’s newly opened production hub, engineers in a massive control room monitor screens on multiple platforms to spot glitches and fix them in seconds. Separate screens receive live feeds of viewer consumption. On top of the studios, a giant data center supports the video feeds, all part of Shankar’s obsession with the product.

“He spent 80 per cent of the time on tech just to ensure that we have a service which doesn’t crash,” said Prateek Garg, managing director at Marigold Park Capital, an affiliate of Bodhi Tree.

Growing up in a small rural town in India, Shankar studied economic history with a goal of learning how to influence Indian society. He found journalism the closest answer to his career goal and joined the Times of India as a political reporter. He later became one of the founding editors of New Delhi-based environmental magazine, Down to Earth. In 1991, he was shocked by CNN’s live broadcasting of the first Gulf War.

“It blew my mind,” Shankar said. “My wife got frustrated with my obsession with TV and told me, ‘Instead of watching it, why don’t you go and do something?’”

He managed to get his first TV job at a network and spent more than four years building a 24-hour live news channel called Aaj Tak before joining the Murdoch family’s Star News as chief executive officer in 2004.

“One thing I knew as a journalist was I knew who was a good expert and how to go to that person to ask the right questions,” Shankar said.

The journalism skills helped him turn around Star News, and his work stood out. In 2007, he took over as CEO of Star India, the choice of Chairman Rupert Murdoch to the lead the company’s entire operation in that country.

“He gave me the license to make mistakes because I was untested,” Shankar said. The corporate DNA of Fox was “go create the market and then you make money in the market.”

India was just beginning to roll out 3G wireless service and had almost no Wi-Fi or broadband access. Shankar’s team started building a streaming platform called Hotstar and he went to every telecom company, begging for partnerships.

“They all rejected the idea and it was one of the most humiliating experiences I’ve ever had,” he said.

The efforts finally paid off after Hotstar offered the International Cricket Council World Cup for free in 2015, with a catchphrase “get over TV.”

It was a beginning of a digital revolution, with Ambani’s Reliance Jio telecom business launching 4G service with free data plans. The two Indian businessmen teamed up to jointly market Hotstar and Reliance Jio, which has since become the largest wireless carrier in India with 471 million subscribers.

Shankar rose to president of 21st Century Fox’s Asia business in 2017, overseeing all of the company’s operations in the region. By the time Fox sold its assets to Disney two years later, Star India’s value had soared to around $15 billion (Rs 1.2 lakh crores). Disney CEO Bob Iger gave Shankar the top job in Asia, leading the launch of its Disney+ streaming service in the region.

Shankar felt more comfortable in an entrepreneurial setting and joined James Murdoch, his old boss at Star India, to form Bodhi Tree. They raised $1.5 billion (Rs 12,541 crores) from the Qatar Investment Authority and others to invest in media deals including Viacom18 and an education technology startup.

Under Shankar’s guidance, JioCinema has been licensing films and TV programing from major Hollywood studios including Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal and Paramount Global, which is selling its 13 per cent stake in Viacom18 to Reliance.

Disney’s lucrative library will be soon onboard with the merger. The new company will have more than 100 TV channels and two streaming services, capturing about 35 per cent of India’s total TV viewership, and 45 per cent of the premium video-streaming business, excluding YouTube and Facebook.

It’s not just movies and TV coming from Disney. The merged entity will also have IPL rights, along with the TV and digital rights to the International Cricket Council’s Cricket World Cup, part of a package of sports that will cost about $2 billion (Rs 16,721 crores) annually, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The research firm Media Partners Asia estimated that the combined businesses lost about $200 million (Rs 1,672 crores) on sales of $2.8 billion (Rs 23,410 cores) in the fiscal year ended in March. Profitability in the traditional TV entertainment business was overtaken by the red ink in sports and streaming.

“The overall business will be loss-making but if you bring the combined cost structure together, they’ll have more synergies and bargaining power,” said Media Partners founder Vivek Couto. The digital advertising revenue will continue to grow along with the growth of India’s economy over the next five years. “After the hard work’s done, let’s say in 12 to 24 months, they should become a pretty profitable scale business,” he said.

Besides capturing multilanguage sub markets, JioCinema aims to build its business around the cricket experience, starting with selling mobile emoji packs featuring IPL cricket stars. It’s a first step to getting consumers accustomed to digital wallets, Marigold executive Garg said. Viacom18 hired Google veteran Kiran Mani to build out the mobile business.

Its content strategy is opposite that of Amazon and Netflix, which pump out big-budget series in India. Shankar’s strategy is to produce inexpensive 30-minute soap operas every day to capture the audience and boost the number of daily active users, a key metric in digital advertising. Eventually, that online viewing will replace traditional TV.

“I’m a big believer in change,” Shankar said. “Sometimes it can be unnerving, it can be difficult, but eventually, I believe it leads all of us to a better place.”