WE LAUNCH a new WWE show on our channel this week. WWE Superstars has been on in the States for a couple of months now, and it’s taken some time for us to complete the agreement with WWE to bring it to India, but now it’s finally on.
A few years ago, this piece of news would be irrelevant to me. I still don’t count myself as a real WWE fan. Yet the more you look at the ratings for WWE, the more seriously you take it. The SportzPower Top 5 ratings for India almost always feature WWE. If India aren’t playing cricket, then WWE can dominate the whole chart. The story is the same in Pakistan by the way, whereas in India, the WWE audience is taken from all social groups, all age-groups, all Cities.
Now we have other wrestling formats on Colors and on ESPN-Star, but WWE has retained and grown the market leadership it’s enjoyed for 7 years on Ten Sports. It is a phenomenon, and one that brings lessons and warnings for the rest of the sports market.
A typical problem for us is the scheduling of the shows when you have live sport on the channel. WWE always out-rates (for example) the likes of the US Open or most West Indies cricket, yet we tend to take the purist view and stick with the live sport. You could argue that our rating points would be higher if we always stuck with WWE in its usual daily slots (5pm and 10.30pm). You’d probably be right, but if we buy sport then we have a duty to show it live and in full wherever possible.
The other side of that argument is that the WWE audience deserve to know where and when the shows will be. The ratings for WWE always increase when we have no live sport interrupting the normal viewing habits of the Ten Sports audience. Watching WWE every night, as with the best soap operas, hooks you onto a need for more.
It’s a problem that afflicts not just WWE but also all the speech based programming we do. Neeraj Jha, Akash Goswami and Anand Narasimhan have been making a weekly show called “Homes of Cricket”. It’s well made, imaginative with interesting subject matter and has been deservedly praised by people across channels as well as by those in cricket. Yet there is currently no significant audience and no sponsorship for the show, partly because the programme has darted up and down the schedules in a period where live cricket has dominated everything we’ve done on the channel.
Speech based and particularly “documentary” programming remains a problem for sports channels in India, with audience ratings and sponsor interest rarely matching the excitement of the production teams to go and create something new (or the excitement of the anchor to be on television interviewing the stars!). Analysis, interview or debate programmes fill the schedules of the sports channels in Australia, the UK or the US but have consistently failed to work in India, other than when attached to live India cricket.
The news channels continue to flourish in this area though, with the very successful business model of pinching the content for free and then hiring a couple of guests to analyse the sport. News channels have the advantage of getting a regular spot for sport in the daily schedule and sticking to it. The shows can become part of a viewers’ daily habit (and for all my sniping on the copyright issue, there are also now some very well made sports news shows in India making excellent use of ESPN or Ten Sports footage).
The other week I was on a discussion show on 9X with the excellent Pradeep Magazine and Rahul Bhattacharya. I was rather unusually cast as being the one focused on the money in cricket for supporting Sachin’s idea to spruce up the 50 over game. The other panellists made the point that football doesn’t change its format every few months. Were it not for the fact that as a pundit you’re allowed to speak only when your microphone is on, I would have pointed out that football across the world has made one very notable change to its format over the last decade. They’ve moved the start of their best games to happen in a regular weekly prime time slot.
The best sport is, like WWE, a bit of a soap opera. You follow the rise and fall of the regular characters. They reach moments of high drama and then return to the mundane. A cricket World Cup or an EPL season allows you the period to pick your favourites, see the story lines and follow them through. There needs to be a context, a history, a tradition, a regular and informed audience to serve as the background to these human interest stories. It’s why WWE works and why one off international friendly events, by and large, don’t.
All this is why the discussions being had across the world of cricket are key to its fortunes in the next 6 years. The new Fixed Tour Programme (FTP) is a battle to try and maintain the traditions of the annual calendars of each nation (the boxing day tests etc) whilst providing a guaranteed number of days of cricket for each nation (everyone wants to play India, no-one is banging down Pakistan’s door). I don’t have the solutions to the varied problems of the FTP, but I do ask for one thing – meaningful cricket at a time when we can see it. If that is provided, then like WWE, the audiences will stay loyal and grow.
The author is COO, Taj Television Ltd.
