India’s television industry has three main sets of players: broadcasters, distributors and content producers. At almost every point in the value chain, extreme fragmentation has been the bane of the business. There are more than 60,000 cable operators, over 600 channels and thousands of programme producers. Add a wonky industry structure and ad-hoc regulation and you can see why over the last five to seven years, the margins for most TV broadcast companies in India have fallen to half the levels they were in the good years. They were good because capital had not begun chasing the business. The moment it did and competition grew, the inherent weaknesses in the industry structure started telling.
