Sony is expanding its business with more channels and regional acquisitions

Sony is expanding its offerings with a variety of contents and is evaluating acquisition of some regional channels.

The company's arm Sony Pictures Networks India (SPN), formerly Multi Screen Media, which yesterday announced launch of two sports channels in partnership with ESPN, plans to add two more, besides widening digital content as the parent backs new investments in the country.
"Sony is very strongly committed to not just India but Sony Pictures Networks India as well. We therefore have been very aggressively expanding in the last few years and that expansion has been in terms of expanding our channel portfolio, and making aggressive investments in our content portfolio," SPN CEO NP Singh told PTI.

He further said: "As far as our channel portfolio is concerned, in the last two years, we have moved from having 11 channels to 18 channels. That in itself is an indicator of the potential that we see in this market and the support that we get from our parent to grow in this market."

Stating that Sony Corp has already announced that "India is a growth market" and will therefore attract a lot of support from it, Singh said the idea would be to find ways to address the diverse market in the country.
"One size fits all does not apply in this market. We are such a diverse market, you have to start looking at segmentation of the market and with that intent we had launched Sony Pal in 2014," Singh said, adding the channel has gained a lot of traction with the rural viewers.

When asked about plans for regional markets, he said: "We have the intent to get into some selected regional markets as well. That process of evaluation is on and therefore I can't talk too much in detail about that but we will look at opportunities of getting into select markets either organically or inorganically."

While admitting that the South Indian market "certainly can't be ignored", Singh, however said "whether it is my priority or not is premature to say but certainly it is in the considered set of markets".
Asked if SPN could make an expansion in the regional market within this year, even through acquisition, he said: "It might take a little longer than that because you have to be careful about which markets you pick and which route you take to enter those markets."

Previously, erstwhile MSM had unsuccessfully tried to pick up 30 per cent stake in Telugu channel MAA, which was eventually snapped up by rival Star India.

Singh said, SPN has one regional channel, Sony Aath in Bengali on which it has experimented showcasing of some of the "marquee sports properties with Bangla language commentary, which did extremely well on that channel".

(Image credits: wikipedia)