Twin tracks: The Reliance-Disney union also has a romantic angle

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₹70,000 crore. This will be a media business in which Reliance will hold over 16% directly and almost 47% via Viacom18 (in which it owns 74%). The rest, a minority stake, will be held by Disney, which got Star’s Indian assets bundled along with its 2019 purchase of 20th Century Fox and has seemed keen on a local guardian ever since.

As a parallel Sony-Zee merger proposal recently came apart, the Reliance-Disney JV will wield significant market influence. This would be thanks not just to its offer basket of popular TV channels (which includes Viacom’s and Star TV’s), but also on account of its online platforms; backed by Reliance’s deep pockets, Hotstar plus JioCinema could keep Netflix and Amazon Prime at bay in a high-octane battle for India’s click-and-watch audience. Overall, the JV’s ad-slot sellers could boast of inventory covering about a third of all Indian eyeballs engaged by general entertainment.

Given how finely splintered the viewership is, this share may prove enough to turn this part of the market from a buyer’s into a seller’s one. Meanwhile, Reliance’s retail and telecom presence hints of outreach synergies as well. Yet, while advertisers may be wary of the JV’s impact on their ad budgets, we can only guess how ad-rate dynamics will actually play out.

One reason why silent cinema had such high appeal in India was our long tradition of nautanki style entertainers, with their simplified scenarios and exaggerated movements. It was the contours of this basic concept, adapted to animation, that gave Disney its early success too. Of course, today’s world of media content spans diverse genres, but this similarity evokes a separated-at-birth story of holding people in thrall that dates back to an era of showbiz