Report – Focus On India

Posted on: Thursday 07 July 2016 10:28am by Zarin Virji

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What are the current connections between the UK and India and where are the future co-production opportunities?

Takeaways

• India provides a big market of 115 million children, watching about two hours of TV daily. Sixty million of these children are urban and 55 million rural
• There is growing demand in India for animation content comprising of fast-paced action with slapstick comedy, without dialogues, aimed at the age group 6-9 years
• YouTube content is targeted at the preschoolers
• India is the doorway to the South Asian market, leading to Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

Detail

Mark Leaver, Independent Consultant and Creative Industries Advisor at UKTI, informed the audience about the UKTI’s offices in all of its India’s main cities. UKTI has established an impressive presence in India.

Munjal Shroff, Director and CEO of Graphiti Multimedia, gave various facts and figures:

• there are 300 animation studios in India
• 40 VFX studios
• 85 gaming studios.
• A high 44% of the shows sourced are from the USA with the UK only having 4% of the market share.

He attributed this small share to the fact that UK shows are not marketed well in India. Locally produced content is in demand as parents want their children to be exposed to their cultural roots. There is a lot of opportunity for the UK to provide screenplay and dialogue writing expertise to India.

Ankur Bhasin, CEO of Bhasinsoft India, encouraged British studios to collaborate with Indian companies particularly on production while working on pre production and post-production themselves.

If you are not convinced of the opportunity then consider this.  Animation accounts for 51.1% and gaming 26.5% of the current media and entertainment industry in India, pegged as a £11 billion-plus industry (2013), with television as the largest growing segment forecast to grow from £4 billion (2013) to £9 billion pounds (2018).

India and the UK share not only the English language but also the same sense of humour. It must be noted that most content produced for India is in four languages: English, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu however the most common language for production is English. Most broadcasters will invest in dubbing as required as well.