The Walt Disney Company, usually known as Disney, an American diversified multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate is expected to scale down its television broadcasting, sports catalog, and film studio business in India.
The move comes close on the heels of top executive Uday Shankar stepping down as president for the APAC (Asia and Pacific) region and chairman, Star and Disney India earlier this month, followed by a global announcement stated that the company’s aim to restructure its media and entertainment businesses to focus on developing and producing original content for the company’s streaming services. The announcement was in a blog on its website.
English entertainment and lifestyle are awaited to take a success post covid, and Star World likely to go off air soon, though there has been no official notification on it yet.
A senior executive from a broadcast company mentions that COVID19 also had a huge impact on sector with cable operators and MSO(multiple system operators) not sharing the income generated from the subscribers for their pay channels, and there is no mechanism to monitor them.
Besides, the Indian Premier League may be taking its own share of eyeballs but, monetizing the sports is going to be a challenge for the next few years with the uncertainty around the sports business, in general, in a world destroyed by COVID limitations. These all are affected by the pandemic, and the entire environment has changed a lot.
The future of ticketing and sponsorship also remains unknown. The other big pullback will be on the film studio front. While Disney itself had stopped all local film production in India in 2016 after the failure of Mohenjo Daro and Jagga Jasoos.
Fox Star Studios has been aggressive over the past few years, with hits like Sanju, Prem Ratan Dhan Paayo, Jolly LLB 2, Badrinath Ki Dulhania, Judwaa 2 and Housefull 4, etc partnership with domestic manufacturing companies owned by Karan Johar, Sajid Nadiadwala, Rajkumar Hirani, and Vidhu Vinod Chopra.
