The Media as we knew it: Digital Dislocations and the Rise of OTT Video

Towards the end of 2022, an advertisement by Dainik Bhaskar, claimed it was among the ‘Top 10 media companies in India”. This was not surprising because the chain of newspapers owned by Bhaskar, includes some of the leading dailies in the Hindi, Gujarati, and Marathi press. Expectedly, other names in the list included three multi-lingual TV broadcast networks (Sony-Zee, Disney-Star, and SUN), and India’s biggest horizontally integrated print and broadcast entity, the Times Group. More significant were the other five members of this elite list, entities we would not associate with ‘the media’ 15 years ago. While two of them, Jio Infocomm and Airtel TV, are telecommunication companies with presence in TV broadcasting and distribution; another one is a stand-alone TV broadcast distributor, Tata-Sky; the remaining two are part of global behemoths in the online economy, Meta and Google India. This list well captures three dynamics marking ‘the media’ as we knew it: one, the transitions and dislocations that have unfolded; two, the relationship between traditional and new actors jostling for eyeballs and revenues; and three, the nature of competition and consolidation witnessed in the Indian media economy. My talk will substantiate these claims. I begin by highlighting the key dynamics of the landscape of ‘the media’ as we knew it in India. Thereafter, I draw attention to the multiple digital dislocations that radically altered the legacy media milieu, the new actors responsible for these dislocations, and the relationship between legacy and new actors. I wind up by reflecting on the policy challenges prompted by the emergent media milieu, and the role of regulatory design to surmount these challenges.