Rohmer V Rupert: Battle Of The Cable-wallahs
ERIC ELLIS, Bombay

06/11/1996

Rohmer MacMahon may well be the media age's equivalent of the little old lady who won't budge from her semi as the hypermarket goes up around her.

From a tiny lean-to wedged between a Bombay slum, a playground and a Christian hospital, Rohmer and his partners are stubbornly resisting the temptations of Rupert Murdoch and others who covet their 8,000-odd cable-TV subscribers.

People like Rohmer, and there are as many as 10,000 in India, are the bane of Murdoch's ambitions to make money out of satellite TV in the sub-continent. While Murdoch's loss-making Star Television can rightly boast that it has maybe 100 million viewers in the region, it can't necessarily say that to advertisers.

That's because backyard operators like Rohmer, known as cablewallahs in the Hindi and Urdu vernacular, happily pull Star's channels down and send it out to their customers, but slot in their own ads where Star's programming breaks.

So instead of seeing the big-ticket advertisers like Coke and Pepsi battle their way into India's fast-emerging market, Rohmer's loyal viewers in Bandra, one of rich Bombay's richer suburbs, see ads from the Well Wisher Estate Consultants, the local hairdresser or placement centre - Create Ripples In Your Career - services much more relevant to daily Indian life than the corporate ads of Japanese giants.

Murdoch's answer seems to be the proverbial if you can't beat 'em, join 'em and the Bombay-based Zee Group, owned 49 per cent by News Corp, is busily building a cable network by buying freelancers like Rohmer.

Zee and Star are coy on how much money they are spending to build a network but Rohmer says they are very high-profile.

"I've seen Murdoch's men around here. We talk to them but we are not very interested," says Rohmer, whose Anglo surname stems from his grandfather, a British Raj surveyor who famously lent his name to the Chinese-Indian border of the day.

"Why should we be. You don't kill the goose that lays the golden egg," Rohmer says.

Rohmer and his ilk are the next frontier in the battle that the broadcasters are beginning to win in messy markets like India, where most people have neither an address nor the money to be formal direct subscribers to Star.

Only two years ago, Rohmer was the norm rather than the exception in the sub-continent.

Murdoch's newly acquired Star was helping mint millionaires by the day in the region as the industry moved faster than the law and, ironically, viewers used television technology against those who provided it.

Today, broadcasters have wised up, their technology has got sharper and the Government has finally got around to assembling regulations for the industry.

What it means for broadcasters like Star is that it is now possible to receive revenue for its Indiafocused service.

Star has launched a pay service which despite the best efforts of the smart boys in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, has proved difficult to crack if one doesn't have an encryptor.

The subscriber doesn't pay for the service, but the cable operators do -Zee demands a royalty of 10 rupees a month (about 30 cents) for each subscriber.

Needless to say, the independent cable-wallahs substantially under-estimate the number of subscribers they have. But it's not turning the broadcasters' way.

With as many as 100 channels available to Indian households, beamed in from any number of satellites hovering overhead, and many more lining up to crack this new market, there's only so much television India can take -literally.

The average Indian TV has room for just 12 channels and cablewallahs like Rohmer are starting to play off Zee against India's State-owned Doordarshan or Jain TV, or the US Discovery against ESPN, safely knowing they are all desperate to build market share.

That makes it very important for say, CNN, to get a slot on a "hot bird", a satellite that carries a popular local channel such as Zee's "Bollywood" movie channel. To pursue the hypermarket analogy, if you get Coles-Myer as an anchor tenant, it becomes easier to woo the smaller shops that feed off its overflow.

The Zee group's CitiCable aren't the only ones aggregating cable networks; most of Bombay's leading business dynasties, the Hindujas and the Modis among them, are doing the same.

Rohmer says he has 8,000 subscribers, but one suspects he might have double that. He keeps his office separate to his operations room because of copyright raids.

If he sold his 8,000 subscribers to Murdoch tomorrow, Star and Zee would have to pay 20 million rupees (about $900,000), which would more than cover the 50,000 rupees it costs him to buy a new receiving dish.

Still, Rohmer is in no mood to sell, simply because he's enjoying the million-rupee-a-month income from his subscriber base, which after government taxes (rarely paid) and royalties (underestimated) leave him with a handsome profit.

"I can afford a holiday now," he says, dragging long and satisfyingly on an imported Marlboro.

He's thinking of Australia, where he's heard they don't have anywhere near the range of television choice he's able to provide.