What’s On India? Helping TV viewers cut through the clutter

Television watchers in India have a problem of plenty. With about 350 channels on the air, they could really do with some help in deciding what to watch.

What’s On India does just that, among other things.

The electronic programme guides (EPG) on most direct-to-home (DTH) platforms and many set-top box-operated cable networks are powered by What’s On India. EPG tells you which channel is telecasting what and when along with a brief synopsis of the programme.

Chief executive Atul Phadnis got the idea to set up the firm in 2003 when the then information & broadcasting minister Sushma Swaraj made set-top boxes mandatory in New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata through the conditional access system (CAS), which later fizzled out.

But the urge to study the TV guidance models in the US, Europe and China stayed on with Phadnis. “The number of channels was going to quadruple or even quintuple and the opportunity was great,” says Phadnis.

In 2005, he quit Television Audience Measurement (TAM), where he had worked for over 5 years. “We started talking to TV networks but they wouldn’t share their schedules with us,” notes Phadnis.

Due to the lack of a uniform scheduling system among Indian channels, Phadnis couldn’t adopt a model operational overseas.

“We had to develop our own EPG,” says Phadnis, whose company saw the light of the day towards the end of 2007. What’s On India turned a corner the following year, with newer players like Airtel Digital and Reliance Big TV entering the DTH market.

Asked of competition, the Nagpur-born-and-bred electronics engineer quips, “What happens in the EPG market is the first mover becomes the only player. That’s how it is in the rest of the world.”

While then EPG provided you a more reliable schedule than the one available in newspapers, the problem of what to watch of the myriad shows and movies remained. “That’s when we decided to launch a TV guidance channel,” recalls Phadnis, who had stints as a media planner before he joined TAM.

In the fag end of 2008, Sequoia Capital and Nexus India Capital invested in the company, which helped it launch the channel a few months back.

The free-to-air channel lists ‘must watch’ movies and shows on different channels and screens their promos for a price from the respective networks.

The channel has taken What’s On India beyond the cable set-top box and DTH market, which forms just 26 million of the 135 million TV sets in the country. “It is available in 250 towns and cities,” says Phadnis.

He hopes to cash in on the Rs 8,500 crore Indian TV advertising kitty to help the channel break even next year. “The greater the competition among content providers, the greater the confusion among audiences and that benefits us,” says Phadnis.