Assessing the 25 billion digital payments target, Mint, 23 Sept

http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/oVmliGKF3SmBomORsxDDzK/Assessing-the-25-billion-digital-payments-target.html

The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made two big bets on digital payments. Some weeks after demonetisation, government representatives began to extol the virtues of digital payments as a means to increasing economic transparency, formalizing the economy, and widening the tax base. As outcomes have shown, this was a sober recalibration of the objectives of demonetization. And earlier this year, the government announced the “DigiDhan Mission” to achieve a 25 billion digital transactions target, outlined in the Union budget for this fiscal. This programme aims to establish a robust digital payments ecosystem in a potentially transformative attempt to drain the swamp of illicit monetary transactions. As we approach the completion of the second quarter of this fiscal, it is important to take stock of achievements against this target.

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The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), an umbrella organization which anchors digital retail payments in the country, has aligned itself with the government target. It has estimated that it will contribute around 11 billion transactions to the government target of 25 billion, through its own bouquet of products and services. By implication, it expects the other 14 billion transactions to come from the Reserve Bank of India’s payments systems as well as private card networks. There are three curious data points which relate to NPCI’s target, that are worth investigating.

First, the NPCI runs the Immediate Payments System (IMPS)—a 24x7 electronic fund transfer service, on which a significant share of interbank transactions are made digitally. In the last fiscal, the IMPS logged just over 500 million transactions. The NPCI estimates that IMPS-based transactions will cross the one billion mark this fiscal, growing at around 100%. With IMPS transactions stabilizing at a monthly rate of 6.5 million in the first quarter, this target will not be met.

Second, NPCI also runs the Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AEPS), of which the much touted Bharat Interface for Money (BHIM) application is a part; and it has projected 1000% annual growth to achieve 3.3 billion AEPS transactions this fiscal. However, over 95% of AEPS transactions in the last fiscal related to authentication services—that is, authentications by the Unique Identification Authority of India over micro ATMs. The NPCI should be circumspect about including non-financial transactions in its 11 billion target. At the very least, a clear caveat is warranted.

Third, NPCI aims for over 650% growth in RuPay-based transactions to account for around three billion transactions in this fiscal. If first quarter statistics are any indication, the NPCI will achieve less than a fourth of its annual target for RuPay.

The central question therefore is: Why is the NPCI, a non-government body, compelled to set unachievable targets to match unfettered government ambition? One can only hope that this is not a bait and switch measure, especially as accountability may not come easily to the NPCI. The Committee for Digital Payments set up by the ministry of finance under the chairmanship of Ratan Watal, is unequivocal about the fact that “the present ownership structure of NPCI might be conflicted with its pivotal role in the digital payments ecosystem”, in its December 2016 report. And now there are clear indications of this conflict playing out.

The NPCI-owned BHIM application, which facilitates fund transfers using mobile phones, is availing of Rs4.5 billion allocated this fiscal by the government for its aggressive promotion through cash-back and referral bonus incentives. Through a fresh notification on 14 August, the government has further extended these schemes till 31 March next year. Subsidization of NPCI’s gimmicky marketing, to achieve a government target, is reminiscent of the way public sector utilities function. Why are Indian taxpayers investing in the growth of NPCI’s products and services?

The crux of the matter is that the NPCI has shunned an ecosystem approach by disallowing non-bank payment service providers (PSPs) from using its network and interface. For banks, PSPs are a necessary evil. Necessary because consumers now demand the ability to make digital transactions through disparate means. And evil because digitization reduces dependence on traditional banking services, and increases the velocity of transactions—whereas banks would want their deposits to be as inert as possible (to maximize interest earned on the “float”).

Consequently, even though many NPCI owners are private businesses, which are themselves products of fair and open competition, they will not complain about receiving preferential treatment from government. It is the government’s job to recognize that creating markets without economic incentives or depth is meaningless. In fact, NPCI, by being the only company which owns and runs retail payments infrastructure as well as its own products and services, and by setting standards that determine who can and cannot participate on its captive turf, is beginning to look like a combination of a regulator and a natural monopoly. It has done little to dispel such notions, even if they seem exaggerated from within.

Frankly, swadeshi start-ups find it as difficult to prosper in this market as foreign incumbents. And while many remain bullish about India, the country’s narrative cannot forever remain confined to that of immense potential. With slowing growth of gross domestic product, an inflection point is upon us.

The government must show that all of its economic and programmatic targets are serious. In this case, it can begin by holding the NPCI to account and by embracing suggestions from its own committee. These include the diversification of NPCI’s ownership, and a road map for setting up new companies that can own and operate critical payments infrastructure like the NPCI does.

Vivan Sharan is a partner at Koan Advisory Group, Delhi.

Legacy Challenges for Online Video, with Yash Bajaj, for the Pioneer, 22 August

http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/oped/legacy-challenges-for-online-video.html

As Indian consumers find themselves in a technologically converged digital world, it is clear that legacy content will not satiate the growing appetite for niche and differentiated content

On January, Netflix reportedly streamed more than 250 million hours of content to its subscribers across the world on a single day. To put things in perspective, that is about 29,000 years of content delivered in just 24 hours. Video on demand on the Internet has rapidly ushered in a new paradigm in the way content is being consumed.

Video on demand providers can amass audiences wherever there is broadband and can carry a wide range of content catering to niche and plural viewing tastes. Illustratively, Breaking Bad, an American television series, missed the linear broadcast twice in the UK   but was such a big success when delivered on Netflix that it bagged the British Academy Film Awards award the following year.

With Internet usage via mobile phones set to double in the next five years, and mobile video traffic to grow nearly 12 times over the same period in India, video on demand is set to penetrate further into the daily lives of citizens, opening up new avenues for monetisation of video content. By 2018, video is expected to drive 72 per cent of all Internet traffic in India, up from 45 per cent in 2013.

The central question, however, is: Can Indian content creators monetise their works using the video on demand model and compete with global companies in this space? With the digital medium now seen as a potential core revenue generator, traditional media and entertainment organisations, particularly broadcasters, are all busy investing in some aspect of this new market. However, the Indian market poses four fundamental challenges.

First, from empirical evidence, India has a very low free-to-paid conversion rate. According to a report by an internationally recognised market research and consulting company, Parks Associates, 32 per cent of those who experiment with free over-the-top (OTT) video trials, such as on Netflix, Amazon Prime or Hulu, subsequently sign up for paid subscriptions in the US. In stark contrast, in 2016, there were about 66 million uniquely connected video viewers in India, but only 1.3 million were paid monthly subscribers.

With the emergence of Reliance Jio’s data services, one can reasonably expect the numbers of free viewers to have expanded exponentially and for the conversion rate to have fallen to less than one per cent.

The challenge for Indian video on demand platforms, therefore, is to create a compelling content proposition at an attractive price point and at a reasonably good quality of service.

But in an ecosystem where a negligible user-base pays for content, underwriting and investing in high-quality content and technology is likely to be financially unviable without subsidisation in some form — either through venture capital or through content deals with traditional broadcasters.

The second challenge is temporal and relates to the evolving patterns of consumer behaviour. Juggernaut Books, a curated online bookshop, converts around eight to 10 per cent of its total users into paid subscribers every month, according to its promoter who spoke at the Create 4 India forum, in New Delhi recently.

Juggernaut’s conversion success is partly attributable to the fact that consumers of literary works are used to paying for books, stories on devices like Kindle and so on.

Even though online written content is ubiquitous and often free, well-curated libraries are not. However, in the context of video content, wherein consumers can access around 700 free-to-air channels on television, getting around to paying substantive amounts for video on demand may take longer.

Moreover, with limitation of television subscription market, by extant economic regulations in the broadcasting industry, inflection point, at which audiences will be encouraged to value good content, is elusive. This impacts the timelines in the digital world.

The third challenge is of sustainability of an advertising-led video on demand market. While revenues earned through digital advertising grew by over 28 per cent from 2015 to 2016, digital advertising accounted for only around 15 per cent of the total advertising pie for the Indian Media and Entertainment industry in 2016. Additionally, a large share of these revenues are going to a handful of large technology platforms that act as primary markets for digital advertising, with their large, captive consumer bases.

Video on demand platforms on the other hand can only charge a fraction of the rates that television channels can charge for placing advertisements. Therefore, the dependence of video on demand  platforms on their brick and mortar cousins (the broadcasters), for cross-subsiding content costs, is still very high.

The fourth challenge is one of perceptions and it relates to Government scepticism of the subscription model. Officials often wonder whether in an unfettered television market, broadcasters will exploit consumers or actually invest in better content. However, investments into content in the global video on demand market should be a leading indicator to go by.

The reason why Netflix had to set aside a production budget of six billion dollars for 2016, and Apple has announced a one billion dollars, annual-spend on content this week, is that they have gauged the demand for quality content among audiences globally.

Investing into better content is not optional in a competitive global market. And global quality content comes at a price. A 50-minute episode of the latest season of Game of Thrones is produced at a budget of $10 million. Until Government recognises these basic dynamics of content markets, the Indian video on demand market will remain indirectly throttled and uncompetitive.

As Indian consumers find themselves in a technologically converged digital world, where video is available on multiple devices and not just television, it is clear that legacy content will not satiate the growing appetite for niche and differentiated content.

There are only so many saas bahu re-runs that the Indian consumer can be expected to watch. The challenge for indigenous video on demand platforms is to effectively tap a growing domestic market, and compete with global peers. And their success is critically dependent on a wider recognition of the legacy of sectoral and regulatory challenges in the brick and mortar world, and their applicability to the digital world.

(Vivan Sharan is Partner, and Yash Bajaj is Programme Associate, Koan Advisory Group, New Delhi)

Bargaining for better content, Mint, 10 August 2017

http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/ZjHkAGZzHh3DEMq7SRrHRO/Bargaining-for-better-content.html

A decade and a half since its liberalization, it seems that consolidation in the telecom industry is now imminent. Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd’s emergence has created 100 million new broadband consumers and the consequent growth in internet penetration is without precedent. India has nearly 300 million broadband consumers, and consumption of online content has driven a large share of this growth. Illustratively, a Cisco report suggests that video traffic will contribute to around 65% of all internet traffic in India by the next year. Around 70 billion minutes of video content will be viewed across the country per month. The critical question, therefore, is whether India’s content creators and owners—including empowered youth with easy access to high-quality imaging devices and broadcasters with access to a unified mode of distribution through broadband networks—will benefit from the disintermediation of legacy distribution networks.

Two aspects must be considered.

First, content industries may have to adjust to the unique demands of the Indian market even as their own distribution channels evolve. Other industries have also had to do this in the past—and only those who adapt, survive. A well-known example from the fast-moving consumer goods industry is that of Chik India Co., a small business which began supplying one rupee “CavinKare” sachets to rural areas in the early 1980s—and completely changed all assumptions about the shampoo business. Big brands had to follow suit, to replicate CavinKare’s success. The telecom industry has also adjusted to Indian realities by offering prepaid packs for as little as Rs10. As a result, the aspirational broadband consumer has taken to browsing the internet on her smartphone and watching videos on small value prepaid packs. This “sachetization” of content places its own set of pressures on the content ecosystem.

Second, the dynamism of consumer preferences is nearly impossible to pre-empt. For instance, when Parliament mandated the digitization of cable TV, many thought that the cost of procuring set-top boxes would lead to attrition in the TV market. Not so. A city-based survey by Jamia Millia Islamia showed that even households at the bottom of the income pyramid decided to “reduce their expenditure on other media, like newspapers, in order to afford the increase in cable rents following the digital switchover”. Consumers will ultimately decide if they want to pay for curated content without ad breaks.

Rapid digitalization has led to much exuberance in the online video market on the industry side—with nearly all large upstream broadcasters investing in online video platforms and betting on dynamic consumer preferences. However, digital advertising accounts for only around 15% of the total advertising pie and the high-end subscription market is yet to achieve scale. Indian content creators and owners will have to find the risk appetite to invest in high-quality, differentiated content to survive in an advertising-led market that has been captured by large technology companies.

To survive the technology-led disruptions that are shaping their markets, content creators and owners will have to strike two bargains. The first should be with telecom networks that “carry” content to the consumer. Jio has upset the profitability metrics of the telecom industry. The industry’s ability to recover to sustainable levels of average revenue per user is a matter of conjecture, but what is certain is that telecom businesses need content businesses to enhance their value proposition. And conversely, content businesses will need to increasingly rely on network innovations, particularly at the last mile, to bring content closer to the consumer (diluting the need for sachetization). The telecom industry should encourage the localization of the content ecosystem through content delivery networks, both to solve congestion issues for their own networks as well as to help monetize content.

The second bargain will not be as easy. The telecom regulator, which has also been regulating “broadcasting services” since 2004, indulges in economic regulation through which it circumscribes the commercial interaction between content owners and “carriage” operators that take broadcast signals to households. All international jurisdictions with advanced copyright frameworks akin to India’s, distinguish between “content” and “carriage”. Content which is sourced from an open market must not be priced by government. India’s exceptional and non-nuanced treatment of content and carriage dilutes the basic rights of content creators and owners. It also harms the consumer in doing so by throttling the ability of established content industries to invest in high-quality programming or into new over-the-top services, due to straight-jacketed revenue.

Content creators and owners must demand their right to price content as per market forces and through the extant copyright framework, which provides a complete code to do so. With a hyper-competitive TV market (nearly 1,000 channels available pan India), and stiff competition from large technology companies online, they currently have little room to manoeuvre.

So, the real bargain should now be struck between different content owners, who must unite against an idiosyncratic regulatory framework which limits this country’s creative potential, pre-empts consumer choice, and poses an existential threat to the business of creativity.

Vivan Sharan is a partner at Koan Advisory Group, New Delhi.