'There is simply too much to watch, read and absorb.'
'Just online consumption (news, entertainment, social media) in India was 2.5 hours a day in November 2024.'
'Add TV (just under 4 hours), other media, and the figure is closer to 7 to 8 hours a day for over one-third of Indians,' points out Vanita Kohli-Khandekar.
Slow Horses is set in Slough House, home to all the rejects from MI5.
These Slow Horses, however, see more action and cause more mayhem than the regular agents sitting in the posh Regent's Park office.
As their obnoxious, dishevelled boss, Gary Oldman is brilliant in this spy caper, now into its fourth season on Apple TV+, a service I have discovered rather belatedly.
Barry Jenkins' Mufasa (Disney), on the other hand, is the sweet story of the The Lion King's origins.
I saw it in an almost empty IMAX theatre on a weekday night.
In the same week came Gaurav Bhhardwaj's opulently mounted play, Humaare Ram.
This re-telling of the Ramayan in verse has some sparkling conversations between Ram and Raavan, both played by the pitch perfect Rahull R Bhuchar and Ashutosh Rana, respectively.
Those are just some of the stories that I saw on streaming, in cinema, and on stage in the last two weeks.
To this, add three seasons of Jason Sudeikis' Ted Lasso (AppleTV+) and Christopher McQuarrie's Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Part One (Netflix).
Then there are hundreds of reels and short videos of cooking, Shah Rukh Khan, Zakir Khan, Kapil Sharma, Graham Norton, among others.
There are three newspapers a day, four magazines a month, and books. (I am discovering Nordic authors with a vengeance these days) And in between all of this, there is work and online scrabble.
The films, shows, books and plays you watch may be different but the story is the same for most of 523 million Indians, who use broadband Internet connected laptops, TVs or phones.
There is simply too much to watch, read and absorb. Just online consumption (news, entertainment and social media) in India was 2.5 hours a day in November 2024, going by Comscore data.
Add TV (just under 4 hours), other media, and the figure is closer to 7 to 8 hours a day for over one-third of Indians.
Note -- this column is largely about the 523 million Indians who are part of an over-served, pampered market. There is a huge not-yet-fully-penetrated market that awaits cheaper smartphones and connected TVs.
For someone who grew up with the State-owned Doordarshan and a single newspaper, this post-liberalisation deluge has been wonderful.
India now has over 900 channels, thousands of newspapers, and over 860 radio channels.
We make more than 1,600 films in a normal year. Then streaming took off in 2018.
The deluge became a flood. With more than 60 video streaming apps and a dozen music streaming ones, there is now an obscenely rich spread on tap.
Artificial intelligence or AI threatens to hasten the process of dubbing and sub-titling to help media firms make shows, films and text at lower costs.
That means more content in a world that is already drowning in it.
This raises three questions. One, where does it all end? When human beings don't have stories to share, perhaps.
Two, what does it mean? The most distracted consumer in the history of humanity.
One piece of research says that heavy screen users have an attention span of 8 seconds.
That is less than that of a goldfish, which is famous for its 9-second attention span.
How could you possibly tell any story or sell any product to this consumer?
That is a battle that broadcasters, streamers, publishers, marketers and now influencers are fighting in a market with billions of choices and rising exponentially even as you read.
To get a sense of the scale, consider this: YouTube alone uploads 500 hours of video every minute.
The neurological damage this glut of content and our own gluttony is doing is something researchers across the world are studying.
Not surprisingly, our ability to savour, appreciate, and discuss things goes down.
That explains why stardom is fleeting, why hits are elusive, and why platforms (read that as Google and Meta) rule.
Earlier, the whole economics of media was based on the repeat value of a piece of content.
A successful film, show or piece of music had a really long life, giving the creating firm the windows to make money on it.
Now, Google and Meta offer audiences across genres and geographies at one-fourth the price of, say, broadcast content.
Forget repeating something; it would be a wonder if many overdosed consumers remember a book or a show.
The democratisation that first the Internet and then the rise of social media brought has meant the boundaries between the entertainer and the entertained, the informed and the informer, the writer and the reader, the listener and musician have collapsed.
The online world is an open, global, audition theatre for anyone who wants to showcase anything.
It could be about your babies, cooking skills, or how well you mimic a celebrity.
When everybody is a creator, who is the audience? That is the third question.
This gluttony has led to a deepening crisis in the media business.
As expectations on quality rise, costs have risen by anywhere from two to four times.
Streamers struggling to make money are increasingly becoming more like TV -- adding ad tiers, sports, games and popular programming -- to get the numbers.
Filmmakers struggle to understand their audience.
In an interview with this reporter last year, writer and adman Prasoon Joshi referred to this phase as one of 'Content Indigestion'.
It is a chaotic time that will eventually help churn out some nectar, he hopes. Amen to that.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
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