Indiantelevision.com brings you the folks who made a difference in 2024 to the media and entertainment industry. It will cover an eclectic bunch of executives and talent from television, film, OTT, advertising, marketing and media industries. Our hope is we end up doing a good job in selecting the right candidates as we write about their achievements in the year just gone by and challenges that lie ahead of them in 2025.
Any errors of selection or perspective or narrative are inadvertent and unintended.
In the meanwhile, enjoy reading about the first of our selection: Uday Shankar who is ushering in change in the media and entertainment space in the streaming era just like Zee TV did in the nineties in satellite broadcasting. Read on to know our perspective on The Man who sees the future, not just tomorrow.
Uday Shankar: The executive who sees the future, and bets on it
He looms like a giant over all other executives in the media sector though from shoes to the tip of his head , he does not exceed 6 ft in height. 2024 was Uday Shankar’s year by far. As will 2025 be.
A master planner.
A master deal maker; he convinced James Murdoch to partner with him to invest in the Indian market through Bodhi Tree. More than that, he managed to get the third most powerful man in India (after prime minister Narendra Modi and home minister Amit Shah) Mukesh Ambani to agree to get into bed with Disney Star India (a company he once headed as CEO).
On top of that, he got the by-then willing Disney CEO Bob Iger to nod in the affirmative for the alliance where the mouse house would cede management control to the Reliance group. The icing on the cake was that he convinced the two of them to give James and himself a piece of the pie in the joint venture that emerged – JioStar.
Uday now leads a much bigger company – almost twice the size of Disney Star which he once headed. Yes, he has Mukesh’s wife Nita Ambani as chairperson and son Akash Ambani having oversight over his moves. But the reality is what Uday wants, he gets. He can be persuasive with his cogent arguments and long-vision thinking and projections. Unlike other leaders in the media, Uday sees the future like others don’t. Probably only one other businessman has his way of thinking – Mukesh Ambani. That’s why he got Asia’s richest businessman’s buy-in for his strategic and tactical moves. Both love to disrupt the status quo – that’s the common thread between Mukesh and Uday.
And Uday bets on that future. In most cases, his “third eye” gets it right.
Now that the joint venture has got past regulatory clearances, Uday has been working on putting his core team in place. And his core team is working on putting their core teams in place. 2025 might see some blood-letting with the excessive manpower (which has emerged on account of duplicated roles in the two companies) being jettisoned. Already senior executives who did not fit into his plans for the corporate structure have been eased out. The merger and joint venture will take some time to digest. Channels have to be shuttered. Synergies need to be established. But eventually everything will fall into place. It normally does for Uday.
And then it will be back to business for him. He is an executive on steroids. He, along with Mukesh and team, have probably already decided which streamer is going to lead – Hotstar or JioCinema. But no announcements have been made. Executives have been told to port Hotstar’s shows on to JioCinema. However, the former’s technology stack is believed to be much more robust than the latter’s.
The best part about Uday is that he knows how much he knows and how much he needs to know. He supplements what he does not know through his team mates who know a lot more about what he does not know. (In simple English, he brings in the best talent to help him). He then trusts them implicitly and delegates fully, something which the Murdochs did with him when he ran their Indian empire. That’s a trust which Mukesh Ambani has also put in him. Of course, there will be the checks and balances that the Ambanis put in the way they manage. But there’s entrepreneurial spirit a-plenty in the world of Reliance.
He will need a lot of that if one considers the IPL rights’ investments which both companies made three years back. The figures seem monstrous; but in Uday’s mind, these were bets which had to be made. So far, both advertising and subscription revenues have not matched the money pumped in. He and his troops have to ensure that the gap is reduced. That could prove challenging as the ad market for certain products was soft during the main spending festival period which went by a couple of months ago. There is no doubt he will drive his foot soldiers hard like a general on the war front to get to their targets even if it seems difficult with bullets and bombs flying around. And, like he is vaunt to, he will in all likelihood don his uniform and enter the battlefield himself.
To his advantage, if the external environment is rough, then there is enough spending ammunition available in-house in the rapid expansion and diversification drive that the Reliance Industries group is making into retail and fast-moving consumer goods. It is already the leading retailer in the country. As well as the leader in telecom and broadband delivery. On the FMCG side, Campa Cola has been relaunched. Snacks have been launched. Many more forays are in the planning stages.
These initiatives will need platforms to reach out their advertising communications to consumers. What better ones can there be than Hotstar, JioCinema, Star Plus and Colors and of course the regional channels which are leading in their respective languages in different states. And then of course there’s the IPL which generates zillions of eyeballs in the country. Loyal ones. Still breakeven might be hard, is what observers are foretelling. However, should the wars – one in the east and the other in the north – that are harming economies end – just like Donald Trumps wants them to – then we might be narrating a different story by this time next year.
At heart, Uday is a man who likes to create and tell stories. Under his tutelage, Star India flowered and bloomed like it had not in the past. Uday understands what consumers want, and, what he did not, he picked up from his colleague at Star India, the former Hindustan Unilever professional Sanjay Gupta who is now Google’s APAC head. He knows how to tell good stories but more than that he knows how to motivate other creative folks around him select good stories and tell them well. Just like he did earlier on in his career when he was a journalist at The Times of India, and he led teams at the India Today group and at Star News.
Uday has been talking television, saying it has long legs within India with 90 million homes and almost 500 million individuals still watching it through pay TV platforms and free DTH from the public broadcaster. He’s determined to take JioStar’s TV channels deeper into India with stories that resonate with the audiences there. But there’s many a problem that plagues those in heartland India like power cuts and load shedding, that makes watching television continuously difficult on most occasions. Hence, even if he succeeds with the drama series and stories how will he ensure continuous power supply? Or will he rely on innovation from within the Reliance group and its partners to help out on this front?
Mukesh Ambani is quite in tune with prime minister Modi’s ambition to take Indian stories global just like south Korea and Turkey have been doing. Honest well-written Indian-made stories made with high production values, reflecting the modern India. And yes the content will have to be made relatable to those in foreign lands. Netflix and Prime Video have done that in a small way by pushing India-made TV shows on their streaming platforms. But they have barely scratched the surface.
It will be up to the likes of Mukesh Ambani and Uday Shankar – actually mostly up to Uday and his band of merry executives – to take Indian content where it has not gone before. Aggressive investments in developing original series and films need to be made either alone or as co-producers with international studios that have the know how and the distribution muscle. There’s Rs 11,500 crore that’s been pumped into the joint venture which needs to be deployed well. Some of that could be used to build the JioStar brand at markets like MipCom where the world’s biggest content creating studios congregate every year.
Within the country, Reliance Jio has distribution deltoids like no one else does. With 400 million plus subscribers consuming video – and hence data, either on mobile handsets or on connected TVs – it can only be win-win for the wireless and wired broadband telco. The more JioStar gets people to binge watch, the more the revenue that will come Jio’s way. Either as video on demand shows or as linear channels being streamed. They will contribute towards Jio’s top line as well as bottom line with data costs dropping – and dropping- and incentivising users to consume more.
We are not sure if this will benefit Uday and his troops as much as it will Jio. But, on the other side, getting preferential carriage and promotional rates will, and could reduce costs for JioStar and its large bouquet of channels and streaming services. Synergies there are a-plenty definitely, despite what we have been told. And what the regulators have been told too.
2025 will keep Uday busy. He is likely to emerge even stronger as the year goes by. Most regard him as one of the top media – no, top business – leaders in India; some say even globally (We, at indiantelevison.com tend to agree). And that’s no mean achievement for a media maverick who used to once travel on a two-wheeler to work every day as a journalist.
