‘There is no entertainment without TV…’
Changing TV environments - A case-study from India
Nimmi Rangaswamy
Microsoft Research Labs India
nimmir@microsoft.com
Abstract
The paper contextualizes changing Television
viewship from an ethnographic study of 39
individuals and 10 families, in Mumbai, India. Over
the last decade, the Indian audiences have been
witnessing
rapidly
transforming
television
technology, content and services. With changing TV
scenarios as backdrop the paper purports to do the
following; 1. To evaluate techno-social scenarios of
new TV services, 2. To examine how these fit into
existing everyday rhythms and routines of family
viewing, 3. To gauge initial audience response to
nascent interactive TV services. We lead arguments
to discuss a set of factors that emerged as critical in
influencing families to adopt new interactive TV
services as everyday entertainment.
Keywords: Ethnography, IPTV, Family TV,
India
1 Introduction to Context
Since the first Television broadcast in 1959, the
Indian audience has adopted TV as the primary
everyday entertainment medium: and this is true for
57% of 1.36 billion people of India (It is also of
importance that around 27% of the 105 million
households subscribing to TV earn less than 5$US
per day!) With 115 million households as audience,
TV viewing commands uncontested attention of
families in contemporary entertainment environments
in India. Over five decades of television, has evolved
from a public twin-channel analog broadcast to a
whopping 300 plus channels, many of these in digital
and interactive formats. Interactive formats are still in
nascent stages and are poised to take-off very soon in
the Indian TV market. Today, we see an upsurge and
urgency among various key players in the Indian
broadcast, corporate, and advertising industry to
influence and stake claims to capture the TV market
through quality services and content.
We conducted a sociological study of 10 families in
the city and suburbs of Mumbai from October 2007
to March 2008. We undertook family visits,
conducted open-ended interviews, and observed
several TV viewing sessions with 39 members from
10 families. All sessions are voice and videorecorded, and transcribed. As this data was collected
in the homes of our subjects, the family context was
immediately at the fore, with individuals narrating
their social and personal TV viewing patterns. In
order to ensure rigour, we broadly coded and
organized data to identify emerging themes.
Our sample had a bias of recruiting a majority of
families that had subscribed to the more expensive
direct to home (DTH) services (DTH services come
closest to interactive TV in India). 6 families had
DTH, while four were persisting with local cable
services. There is no immediate co-relation of an
expensive subscription to a higher-income group. 3
out of the 6 with DTH were clearly middle-class and
the highest income earner in our group had cable TV.
We looked at other correspondences between family
contexts and early adoption of interactive TV, and
came up with several social factors influencing
decisions around adopting specific TV services.
Before we list these, we discuss arguments
substantiating family dynamics that shape TV
viewing behaviour, which in turn reordered everyday
rhythms of domesticity.
2. Television today in India
‘There is no entertainment without TV’ is a common
refrain vocalized by audiences across the country. TV
brought entertainment into the home and a window to
view global life-styles. It set trends for consumption
behaviour and influenced purchase patterns. More
importantly, it ordered routines and daily rhythms of
the household with TV programmes featuring
prominently in calendaring family events [1, 5]. TV
content and viewer preference mutually shaped the
cadences of everyday domesticity [2, 6].
A plethora of TV technology and services has entered
the Indian market in the hope of capturing the biggest
entertainment audience in the country. These range
from the humble analog-cable TV to digital TV to the
high-end direct-to-home satellite TV and IPTV over
broad band. The latter introduced nascent experiences
of interactive TV with a promise of introducing
enhanced and high-definition scenarios of viewing.
Fragmented by socio-economic factors, bulk of
Indians, nevertheless, watch regular homogenized TV
content and adopt an affordable pricing structure
managed by local face-to-face delivery services1.
Media entertainment in India is changing contours,
introducing layered TV content and pricing to scaleup and service an economically fragmented market.
Direct-to-home (DTH) services and interactive
Television (IPTV) entered India around 3 years ago
promoting multi-viewing options, video-on-demand
and superior allied services (ease of payments and
complaints redressal) as their unique-selling–point.
Further promises vouched to transform TV viewing
experience with private video recordings and ondemand TV. These have clearly altered expectations
and experiences of the everyday TV and introduced
current trends and future hints of re-ordering
domestic life.
Rapidly changing consumer trends following
India’s economic boom pre-empted enhanced and
affordable TV services. With increasing purchasing
power and robust credit economy, Indian middleclass consumers are openly turning adventurous.
They willingly partake of higher and more expensive
services if convinced of two things: One, value for
money in fulfilling an existing need with increasing
ease and two, sufficient social recognition of this
consumer behaviour (the latter brings in social
endorsements for higher family expenditure).
1
The four main categories in this arena are; Cable/analog TVthe most numerous (70 million), cheap, homogenous, reliable and
robust, governed by the neighbourhood service provider. It has
little to offer in terms of rich user features and interactivity. New
entrants are the more expensive digital TV and DTH networks
gaining slow ground (4 million). These offer high quality of
broadcast, a certain amount of on-demand content and enhanced
user features such as sort-and-search, multi-angle views,
customizing favorites, alerts and reminders The latest technology
to test the market is IPTV with around three thousand subscribers
and promises of private/digital video recording and fully ondemand TV content at very competitive rates in the near future.
3. Everyday TV is Family TV
The television has always belonged to rooms not
persons!-the living room TV, the ‘grans’ TV and the
bedroom TV. Even multiple TVs in an Indian
household are shared. Everyday TV is family TV and
is a shared media. There were always rules the family
imposed about TV consumption at home. It could
well be a means to negotiate and control the child’s
demands for unencumbered freedom to use media as
much as creating a family situation to share media [4]
Women of the house, both home makers and
working almost always multi-tasked with the TV
whenever they watched; having lunch/dinner in front
of it, chopping vegetables, folding clothes. A 40 year
old mother/school teacher told us “I usually do my
corrections watching late night movie reruns… May
be 2 AM…”. Almost none turned on the TV in the
mornings until noon. It was a time to set house in
order. Women rearranged their everyday schedules to
watch a favorite show, drawing family to watch and
converting them to family favorites. A busy working
women with two teen children said “I come home
from work and one of my children has already turned
on the TV… I quickly freshen up and begin to switch
channels to catch on atleast two soaps at a time. It’s
like making up for all lost time. I even manage to
cook dinner for the family as I watch my favorite
story unfold…”
Prime time was for soaps and everyone sat around
the TV to given company to each other. Children
constantly lunged for the remote to switch channels
for more interesting content and usually hated family
soaps their mother watched. But finally the entirely
family relaxed with the mother’s pick of prime time
TV! Mothers emerge as television rule-makers of the
household. A college going son remarked “I take
courage and switch channels… but I dare not touch
the remote during mom’s favorite serial”. Fathers
could maneuver week-ends to watch their favorite
sports and drew their family as audience. Week-ends,
and live cricket matches were probably the only time
that disrupted primetime schedules. As a father
quipped ‘… I get to watch what my wife watches and
I don’t like to fight …”
Children never get personal a TV. We had one family
in the sample that placed a TV in the child’s room.
But it never assumed a sacred personal space for the
child, and was readily accessible to the family. A
mother of two teen daughters, from the most wealthy
family in our sample, said, “We give them
everything, fancy mobile phones, PCs, even
laptops… they are always in their rooms doing stuff
with these. TV is the only media that draws them to
us…” Her daughter added “I would love a candy TV
in my room… but then TV is the only thing I do with
family at home. So be it”. An 18 year old high school
student quipped “I managed to persuade my parents
to pay for a TV tuner in my PC… And I watched all
the sports I wanted to… It has been since removed
by my mother with my impending exams”.
In a three-generational family of grandparents living
with the nuclear unit, chances of acquiring a second
TV shoot-up. Often times it is placed in their room.
Ostensibly, the second TV is to accommodate
preferences between generations but TV viewing is
always a one-plus affair. The women of the house
watch with the elderly couple based on everyday
schedules. A 45 year old father with two teen sons
admitted he got more leeway to watch his preference
on the TV in his parent’s room. The second TV is
also found in the parent’s bedroom for late night
movies or specific content – but this again is not an
inviolable sacred space. The TV is never considered
private media. There is implicit allowance to share!
4. Responses to Nascent Interactive TV
New TV services are driven by similar family
concerns. Buying and using digital and interactive
services impinged on family preferences, daily
schedules and skirmishes to allot time for preferred
content. High-end services cost money and hence a
family decision to incur the expense. Nevertheless we
see hints of personalization of TV that otherwise
commands a joint and shared viewing pattern.
In our sample the decision to go for DTH and
IPTV were dictated by a niche preference in the
family. A son wanted the exclusive bouquet of sports
channels unavailable in any other regular TV
schemes. A family went in for the offer of interactive
games in a DTH service. Their 12 year old son was
not considered ready to game on a PC. They
preferred the child to game in a shared media.
Another reason was the constant bickering arising
from grandfather’s insistence on his scheduling of
favorites. A third example is a yuppie couple wanting
enhanced experiences of their everyday TV to relax
and enjoy. Yet another subscriber installed the
service to access exclusive channels in dialect. Here,
we are beginning to see an exercise of personal
choice in a shared arena. Nevertheless, Overt
personalizing of services evoked a weak response.
Features that got personalized are family favorites.
The children viewed personalizing TV as fun but had
little time to bother! They had other devices that were
person friendly.
However, it is interesting to note the availability of
enhanced technology features, like search options,
are not under optimal use. Most parents and
grandparents did not bother to use them. It was either
too complicated or did not appeal as providing the
extra thrill it was meant to. Even the remote control
to activate the enhanced services needed time to
master. Children were quicker to adapt and even
taught elders. But TV being the family medium,
children drifted back to their feature-rich mobiles and
PCs. Home PC are also shared devices but the
mastery of the child over this technology allowed
maximum access to children of the home.
It seems interactive TV came with a price and little
established value to persuade the viewer. A couple
said “Though we have 200 channels and as many
programmes… we hardly record or subscribe. There
are so many re-runs and late night stuff that we rarely
use these. It is not worth the price...”
The
well-informed
audience
understood
technology and desirous of on-demand content and
freedom from scheduling. They are unhappy with
pre-mature technology and want ready scalability and
a complete viewing experience2. The yuppie husband
echoing the sentiment “I will want all TV content on
2
See [3] for an understanding of IPTV
a data base. I want complete control to search and
sort at will…. I will also want to choose the foot ball
league of my choice, the last quarter before halftime!”
5
Factors of influence
We keep in mind the on-going nature of study as
we draw a list of factors in varying order of
importance to highlight family dynamics and
adoption patterns of interactive TV: 1.Life-stage of
family. 2. Number of members/generations in a
family. 3. Age of child/children. 4. The second or
multiple TVs in a family. 5. Presence of other media
devices in the home. 6. Family income3. Ethnography
point to two big early takeaways; That TV viewing is
overwhelmingly shared and diverse. There is
palpable need for switching channels to take-in
maximum content and everyday adjustments among
family to accommodate diversity and preference.
Further analysis of data can lead to an examination of
diverse socio-cultural family contexts and practices
impacting user experience; adoption of interactive
TV technology and services; offering novel design
solutions to fit contexts of use. Finally it points to a
variety of states of technology as they evolve and
immerse in everyday life
References
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Power and Domestic Leisure, Routledge, UK
(1986)
2. Fiske, J, Audiencing: a Cultural Studies
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Proceedings of the Second Australasian
Conference on Interactive Entertainment IE
2005, November (2005)
4. Cardoza, Kavitha, Parental Control over
Children’s Television Viewing in India, in
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5.
We are aware of educational levels in the family playing a
significant role in decision making of any kind. We have
yet to delineate correspondences of this nature in our
study to offer convincing arguments.
6.
Contemporary South Asia 11, 2, 135–161
(2002)
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