The Hindu Business Line : `Global entertainment biz to gravitate to Asia' — India may garner $200 b, says Shekhar Kapur

THE global entertainment industry, projected to touch a whopping $1.8 trillion by 2015, is gravitating towards the Asian region, and India has the potential to garner a chunk of it — about $200 billion.

Riding on the emerging digital infotainment wave, India can do with this sector what its human resources have managed to do for the IT services industry.

Actor, director, film-maker and now an entrepreneur, Shekhar Kapur, said that he has been evangelising the immense latent potential of this untapped market, and it has taken a while for consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers to come up with the numbers about the potential of this sector and how Asia fares in this.

"From a predominantly a West and Europe-centric entertainment industry, signs are already evident that the market will gravitate towards the Asian region. It is indicated that out of the $1.8 trillion, at least $800 billion would be in the Asian region and of this, India could possibly account for $200 billion. This, we expect, would be larger than the IT services industry," he said.

This optimism is despite the fact that the Indian entertainment industry is still less than $1 billion and extremely fragmented. The market in the West, particularly the US, is saturated and extremely protected. While the radio took 25 years to reach out, Internet expanded in seven years, the digital entertainment would take less than three years to grow.

The best part is that films would contribute barely 10 per cent of this entertainment market, about 60 per cent would be through convergence where content would be made available on mobile devices.

Global hybrid

"There will be what we expect a global hybrid that blends best of the West and East, which will pave the way for Asian hybrid, that blends countries in Asia. This means a major of the content development would move to Asia," he said.

One of the challenges India is faced with is building leaders who can be creative and the accent has to be on IP (intellectual property) creation, he said.

India has 12,000 legal cinema theatres and 85,000 plus video parlours and these will account for about 10 per cent of the overall entertainment industry and the rest would come from other media, he said.

Kapur, who was in Hyderabad to interact with students of Indian School of Business, spoke about the challenges faced by the sector in bringing about scale of economies. The Business & arts initiative of the ISB brings together students and select artistes providing a platform for interface.

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