Anup opines that the monthly rating system will help content creators adopt a holistic approach in scriptwriting, avoid kneejerk reactions.
Chennai: The second edition of Medianews4.com Straight Talk, The brand Stories, a regional brand summit saw Anup Chandrasekharan , Business Head – Colors Tamil, take on the Tamil TV industry and said, we as Content Producers should take the risk and do our best.
Elaborating further on the topic of Content in television in the Tamil Nadu market, he said, we have 70 serials starting from 10 am – 10 pm most originals and a few dubbed serials.
What you actually see is the same story told in all the channels, if the channel logo is removed the content is the same, this is due to the following reasons – Lack of content writers and this results in rehashing the same stories/ scenes across channels.
Another standard way of depicting women in the stories, a women is another women’s enemy, the reason as per me is all stories are being written by men. Their viewpoint or their thoughts towards a women are stilted.
Anup felt “that the business has lot of constraints as the story told in a serial thanks to the ratings have a standard pattern. This leads to an artificial way of telling a story and most of the time the viewer feels cheated”.
Today serials are being churned out like products in a factory, “for this to change one has to start thinking out of the box, it can start with us but it is going to be long haul. Today a story has 50 characters as the story has to run for 2 years to break even. Also the most common genre is Family Drama and romance, we have forgotten to make good comedy/thriller and Sitcoms. This will be the main reason for people to migrate to other content platforms.”
Anup felt that today’ TV content doesn’t have depth and many genres are missing. Historical, serials with social messaging do not find takers but there is a vast scope for these. But there is a silver lining as per him thanks to Digital, the viewer cannot be taken for a ride and we in the traditional media space don’t change the digital platform will take over. Anup felt that “content has to become platform agnostic.”
Talking about Colors Tamil, he said “we have been in the market for nearly two years now and we haven’t done anything big to bring changes in the way we put our content out. This will take time and has to be done in a sustainable way as TV viewing is habit-forming and for most of our viewers in TN it is appointment viewing. Before launching the channel we researched for nearly a year and we travelled the length and breadth of Tamil Nadu to figure out as to what the viewer really wanted to watch. We did many meaningful stories and also some socially relevant topics. We wanted to celebrate the ‘Women’ as they are our primary viewers. The main reason for us to launch ‘Kodeeswari’ was this. It is a show of hope, optimism and celebration.”
Anup during the session mentioned that it would really help content creators to put better content if there was no pressure of TRP’s every week. He felt that it would be better if the numbers came out once a month, he said that this was his personal opinion, as this will ease the pressure on the writers as they will not be pressurised with kneejerk reactions to keep changing the script on a weekly basis. If numbers are declared once a month then Brands and Planners will also look at the content in a more positive way.
Anup concluded his session by saying, “We as content creators need to up our ante and do more meaning full content. But as advertisers and planners, they need to get out of their safe zones, stop looking at TRP’s and invest in good content”.
