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| Edited By: Ashish K Tiwari |Source: DNA |Updated: Mar 21, 2018, 05:21 AM IST
See, innovation is the name of the game today and one has to continuously keep refreshing the identity. More so when you are in a genre like sports, you have to move along with lot of action, dynamism and the whole spirit of achieving your goals. That's why we have calling it 'Never Stop'. So as a positioning of our network, last year in August we thought of refreshing our logos, changing the indents and creating a new brand identity. That's how the journey started. We have also created a huge focus on our digital presence wherein we totally revamped our website www.tensports.com with a lot of live and video on demand (VoD) content.
While we were doing all the re-branding exercise as a process, we also realised our content line-up was spread across genre and sectors and that we were positioned as a destination viewing channel. For instance, if you wanted to view cricket you landed on Ten Cricket, for football you chose Ten Action. So, looking at the complete content line-up we had, it becomes at times challenging to allocate a particular content to a particular channel. So we thought this is the right opportunity to break away from the destination specific channels and take the numeric route where you provide best of the viewing to the audience. That called for rearranging and rechristening of our channels and that's why Ten 1, 2 and 3. So starting April 1, 2016, we will have five channels of which three will be standard definition (SD) and two will be high definition (HD). Ten Gold HD used to be an SD channel, but looking at the consumer profiling and the way audience wants, it we have converted it into an HD channel.
Everything was done in-house. The complete brand designing, re-branding activity, programming line-up and all the indents were done by our in-house team. We have very strong in-house capabilities and we believe in leveraging that.
I think there is nothing better than sports to follow the ethos which we as a group follow. I say this because sports is the only genre that cuts across age groups, gender, markets and is indifferent to any kind of a bias. The whole world is our family and the sporting events that we offer to our consumers / audience come from all the nooks and corners of the world on a common platform.
We have basically adopted the core and satellite strategy wherein each channel will have a core programming content line-up and then there would be other related sporting events that are not necessarily core. So with a mix of core and other sporting events line-up, we will be able to create higher consumer engagement around it. For instance, Ten 3 will have cricket from various cricket boards as its focus area, but it will not stop only at cricket. There will be a lot of other associated sporting events that will be available on the channel as well. So if you are an avid cricket follower, you may still get a lot of great stuff to watch around cricket on Ten 3, but you will have a choice of having other non-cricketing events.
It will be difficult to allocate a ratio because sports events are all live and based on when it is happening.
We are in the process and will discuss about that at the right opportunity. But, yes there could be more line-up in the future.
Our revenue line-up over the last three years has grown multi-fold across subscription, advertising sales and syndication revenues. Ten Sports is a home-grown global company and is beamed into 19 countries and we distribute our content globally. In terms of revenue up-tick, the way I look at is that this brand identity is in line with our company ethos and culture of being a dynamic and action-oriented broadcaster. We keep on pushing for our spirit of achieving more and never stop towards achieving the goals we keep resetting for ourselves. This culture of speed and energy leads to increased revenue and that's a natural outcome.
