‘Who Will Watch It?’ Prasar Bharati CEO Recalls Initial Reactions to ‘Ramayan’ Re-Run
Prasar Bharati CEO Shashi Shekhar Vempati is credited with presiding over the most-watched TV display in history– The Ramayan, whose re-run on Doordarshan garnered 250 million perspectives. Curiously, he remembers that his WhatsApp teams rang with laughter when the scoop of the display hit the headlines.
Sharing the reactions, he mentioned, “They are all, like, guffawing. Who is going to observe it?! I needed to inform them that, you already know, India may be very other. It isn’t simply the English talking elite, it is a lot larger, a lot more various. So there was once that concern,” Vempati advised IANS all over a video interview at the backstory of Prasar Bharati’s programming all over the COVID-19 lockdown.
The display was once telecast quickly after High Minister Narendra Modi ordered the primary lockdown in overdue March. After the re-run started, Doordarshan’s achieve soared well beyond the highest seven Hindi normal leisure channels. Time spent on Doordarshan moved from 15 mins every week to greater than 70 mins. The re-run on April 16, 2020 by myself logged 77 million audience.
“It was once loopy,” Vempati mentioned, detailing the nuts and bolts of sourcing the Ramayan from the Ramanand Sagar circle of relatives in Mumbai.
“The tapes had been within the deep archive of the (Ramanand) Sagar circle of relatives, and in Mumbai it was once like working in curfew. Anyone needed to bodily retrieve this stuff. The codecs had modified. Other people needed to paintings throughout the evening to determine find out how to get it right into a appropriate structure, after which push it from Bombay. For the reason that record sizes are so huge, you’ll be able to’t do it over the web, it might have taken perpetually. So we had a satellite-based mechanism during which the content material was once beamed from Bombay and downloaded into servers right here, in order that day after today’s episodes may well be aired.”
Just about two months on, as India’s lockdown eases, Doordarshan viewership numbers are already reflecting the shift clear of binge-watching spikes.
Vempati is now fascinated by “reinventing the logo” for India’s early life whilst staying clear of what he describes because the pitfalls of target market segmentation and OTT content material this is inconsistent with “circle of relatives values and tradition”.
“Someplace, the calculus of target market segmentation has misplaced its approach,” Vempati mentioned, chatting with how households watch fully other content material throughout a couple of units all over instances when they may as a substitute be sharing a not unusual viewing enjoy.
“The mix of lockdown and ‘Ramayan’,” he mentioned, “confirmed us that households can nonetheless come in combination round tv if the content material is healthy and appeals to each and every section. Nostalgia was once all the time a pattern for Doordarshan. Whilst we leverage nostalgia, we will be able to’t depend on that by myself”.
For Vempati’s staff, the upside to Doordarshan’s lockdown programming is logo consciousness amongst “a complete era born into the sector of cable and satellite tv for pc and web”.
Talking with candour in regards to the interior workings of public broadcasting, Vempati mentioned Doordarshan luckily unearths itself sitting on a pile of unpolluted content material as a result of “bureaucratic procedure takes that lengthy to convey content material on it”.
“So whilst the remainder of the business is suffering, we’ve got a big library that has now not been noticed through audiences throughout India which we will roll out in the following few weeks.”
Vempati issues “historical past buffs” to Doordarshan’s YouTube channel. “We now have the oldest TV interviews of Nehru. In truth, his closing TV interview which he gave to an American broadcaster, simply weeks earlier than he passed on to the great beyond we’ve got retrieved the ones, put them on YouTube.”
He mentioned High Minister Narendra Modi’s connection with the metaphorical “Lakshman Rekha” when he ordered the primary India lockdown was the tipping level for Prasar Bharati to move all in on mythological content material.
“So one of the vital questions that afflicted me once I joined to function a board member and afterward as CEO was once that every one of those iconic serials have immense nostalgia and logo attach however we would not have get entry to to any of this content material,” Vempati mentioned.
Prasar Bharati took the verdict to re-acquire this content material overdue October 2019 nevertheless it took a lockdown announcement to fast-track the closure. Ramayan’s 4 episodes an afternoon structure was once in accordance with the idea of a 15 day lockdown. Ramayan closed out its re-run in mid-April.
Vempati is pushing laborious for organisational collaboration with academia and startups to create what he calls an “enabling” setting to develop into India’s public broadcaster for the virtual age. Prasar Bharati is operating with Indian Institute of Generation, Kanpur, round analysis collaboration on direct-to-mobile broadcasting.
“We now have requested IIT-Kanpur to create that enabling setting, create the test-bed to usher in startups. After which let’s examine what we will be able to do on this entire ecosystem. In order that effort is on.”
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