MUMBAI: India is the fastest growing media and entertainment (M&E) country amongst the top 15 markets and the sector is poised to gain greater significance nationally and globally. To be a game changer, Ficci says that collaboration and policy revamp are required to pave the way for a billion consumers to engage with the industry.

The trade event event for the business of media and entertainment, Ficci Frames 2013, will be held from 12-14 March at Hotel Renaissance, Mumbai, India. The theme of the conclave is ?A Tryst With Destiny: Engaging a Billion Consumers?.

According to the Ficci Media and Entertainment Committee, what would drive this progress is collective innovation on part of the industry verticals and support from the government in establishing empowering policy initiatives to rapidly transform this sector. Within the industry, stakeholders believe that exponential growth is the function of a strong environment of creative collaboration in content, digitisation, infrastructure, distribution platforms and consumer spends and a series of avant-garde policy changes which will drive industry revenues to double in value, generate employment and develop sector skills.

Strong FDI inflows will drive this growth, making India a global powerhouse in this industry. Digitisation and the commitment from policy makers to keep it going will be critical, as will the industry?s adopting transparency & governance best practices to access capital.

The past decade has seen unprecedented changes and challenges. Audiences consume media & entertainment in newer ways and the advent of technology, superior connectivity, gadgets and gizmos that stream content and the impact of the internet have led to an explosion of experience and expectation. Allied areas such as gaming, live-shows, webcast, podcast, digital distribution has changed the way media and entertainment is consumed.

Indian content will find its way into international markets -- adapted and beamed into western homes on new technology drivers. Available content needs to be repurposed based on content relevance, customer demography, customer preferences and push methods.

Rapid digitisation will enable collaborative broadcast production on a variety of platforms, which can be directly accessed from a billion consumers. The biggest benefit from digitisation is analytics -- capturing analytics for monitoring and refining the content usage has multiple benefits such as extra revenue from the existing contents, in effect increasing shelf life, customer specific contents, demography based targeted advertisement, utilisation of user data generated for developing targeted content and more.

In this multi-screen, media-rich world, the consumer is king and the impact on the Indian media and entertainment industry is profound. What are the policy boosters needed to kick start exponential growth a realise this potential? This is what will be discussed

Ficci?s Policy Representation on M&E industry:

In Television, fiscal measures to ease various duties on cable, broadcasting & DTH verticals, and remedying transponder capacity would boost industry expansion.

In Radio, FDI being raised to 49 per cent according to Trai recommendations and resolving licensing and spectrum issues will enhance profitability as much as introducing sports broadcasting.

For the Film industry, the Cinematograph Act needs to be urgently amended, so that there are no impediments to its screening once the censor board passes a film. Also, film professionals need to be taxed more reasonably.

In Animation and Gaming, a 10 year tax holiday, co-production treaties, reduction in import duties and infrastructure development will completely regenerate the vertical to new heights.

OOH, Music and Internet too need closer attention. Inadequate wire-line infrastructure in the country affects broadband penetration. A sustained program of broadband roll-out will improve content consumption manifold and open up incremental revenue streams for content owners.

At Frames 2013, the aim is to deliberate on the growth of the industry and find ways to maximise both its creative and economic potential by engaging with the billion strong consumer base in our country. We have key international thought leaders, studio heads and academics lined up to speak on a range of topics covering the main objectives of the sector - digitisation, making big budget films and being successful in Bollywood, censorship, marketing, exhibition, distribution, viability of the sports broadcasting business, the future of content consumption in an era progressively getting defined by the digital media, innovation and planning required in various policy issues within TV, cinema, animation and gaming.

Ficci Media and Entertainment committee chairman Uday Shankar said, ?The theme for Frames this year is ?A Tryst with Destiny ? Engaging a Billion Consumers?. While the industry has made spectacular progress in the last 20 years in increasing the intensity of engagement with the Indian consumer through superior content ? there is still a gap in our ability to monetize the engagement and use the resources generated to advance both access and content. 2013 is a year of many milestones in the media and entertainment industry and FRAMES will offer an opportunity for us to put these developments into perspective, look at the larger picture and engage on such a bold and important theme?.

Ficci noted that the media and entertainment sector has an enormous potential for making a considerable contribution not only to the GDP of the country, but also as a harbinger of social change. It?s potential to engage with a billion consumers will create a value proposition unprecedented in recent memory, thus creating a new source of economic and social wealth. It may fundamentally utilize direct consumer relationships in a variety of value-creating ways -- to inform and shape public opinion, to gain feedback on the content consumption experience, develop new commercial offers and marketing campaigns, inform and shape content production, develop new methods of content packaging & distribution and optimize pricing to increase revenues.

Ficci Media and Entertainment committee co-Chairman Karan Johar said, ?The M&E industry has the potential to become the catalyst for social change and a force of good for every niche of society. FICCI Frames has been the most eminent platform for the M&E sector and its initiatives over the past decade have improved the quality of content generation, skill development and stature of the industry. We believe that our new agenda will be the change agent for social and commercial development, connecting a billion people, while shaping and informing their opinions and getting influenced by their collective needs in turn.?