‘Realty ads can’t miss us’

Distribution is the biggest challenge, says Prem Kumar Menon, CEO, Real Estate TV. About a year back, when the channel took to the skies in India, Menon was betting on the increasing level of digitisation in television to distribute his 24-hour real estate channel. But direct-to-home (DTH) players remain sceptical, which could mean breakeven is a couple of years away, says Menon of the channel, the first of several niche channels its parent, Alliance Broadcasting, plans to launch over the next few years. DNA Money’s Arcopol Chaudhuri spoke to Menon about the niche nature of the channel, challenges in garnering viewership and distribution bottlenecks. Excerpts:

You attended the recent FICCI event on real estate in Mumbai. How was the response to the channel?
We were the media partners for the event. Our aim was to let the real estate industry —builders, infrastructure, architects and participants — know that there is a channel on real estate. People were very happy to know that finally somebody has done this for the segment.

The real estate sector, it seems, is passing the buck on to the media for its current slump. How does your channel approach real estate news in these times, when you risk losing advertisers by going for fair reportage?
That’s a matter of opinion. You can’t help journalists from writing what they perceive. We try to stick to the facts though. I don’t see anything wrong with that. The real estate slump is a fact.

The channel has limited viewership right now…
Yes. We’re in about 2 million homes right now. That’s a stated figure, since we’re only on digital cable. We’ve been talking to DTH platforms, but they’re either asking for huge carriage fees or claim that there’s no capacity to carry a channel like ours. And everyone’s been asking, what can you show on the real estate sector in a 24x7 format?

So what do you plan to do?
We’re a young channel. We’ve not even begun marketing the channel aggressively. But if you see the channel, you’ll notice some pretty innovative programming. There’s also a semi-fiction programme, alerting viewers on the different ways in which somebody can break into your house! So, house safety, designing of homes, architecture, hourly news updates... it’s all there.

According to you, what will be the biggest challenge, going ahead?
Distribution is going to be the biggest challenge. Today the distribution platforms are all full. So they (DTH players) say ‘wait for a month or so’. They say they have to get more bandwidth, only then we can be on air. More DTH players are expected to launch, so the scene might be different in a few months from now. Till then, increase in our presence across digital cable homes should serve the purpose. Although it costs me about Rs 20-30 lakh annually to be present on each digital cable network, it’s still much reasonable compared to Rs 3-4 crore DTH players command annually.

That takes care of subscription revenues, marginally. How will you garner advertising revenues, considering the real estate sector has tightened purse strings?
Advertisers will come in, since they realise we’re a channel exclusively for them. And I don’t think advertisers would like to miss out on an opportunity. We’ve just begun unlocking our ad inventory at rates starting from Rs 8,000 for 10 seconds.

What kinds of advertisers have shown interest?
Builders have been the first one to respond to the channel. In the infrastructure industry as well, people consider this channel as a forum for them. They will support us. For advertising, real estate players never had it so good, since our rates are competitive. We’re charging rates in the range of Rs 1 lakh per episode (30 minutes).

When you launched, you’d said that Rs 100 crore would be invested in the channel over a period of 2 years. How much money have you set aside on programming and distribution this fiscal?
At least Rs 25-30 crore on programming, and at least a crore on distribution.

And how much of the programming is produced in-house?
About 80% of it, the rest is outsourced. We’re about 120-people strong, if I take all our bureaus into consideration.
c_arcopol@dnaindia.net