Television shakeup: Geo Entertainment to partner with A&B Productions

Move seen as prelude to a major restructuring of the television industry.

KARACHI: In a move likely to shake up Pakistan’s television industry, Geo Entertainment is entering into a partnership with A&B Productions, one of the most prolific television studios in the country.

The move has yet to be disclosed publicly, and both Shadab Tayyab, the acting head of Geo Entertainment, and Babar Javed, one of the founders of A&B, declined to comment when contacted by The Express Tribune. Yet even the rumour has set the entertainment industry abuzz, with many industry experts welcoming the move as a positive development that is likely to improve television production in Pakistan.

While the details of the agreement have yet to emerge, sources familiar with the matter say that A&B and Geo Entertainment may conclude a partial share-swap agreement, as well as a contract that will ensure that the bulk of the content produced by A&B is aired on Geo Entertainment.

Part of the Jang Group, a media conglomerate that owns Pakistan’s largest Urdu newspaper and cable news channel, Geo Entertainment has been struggling over the past year to retain its position in the ratings. Three years ago, Geo was easily ranked as the top entertainment cable channel. Since then, it has slid to number three in the ratings, losing the top spot to ARY Digital, which has shot up owing largely to content generated by A&B Productions.



The hit to its ratings was also beginning to affect revenue. Industry sources say Geo Entertainment’s gross revenues for the month of March 2013 were Rs160 million, down 20% from the Rs200 million in the same period last year.

The brain-child of actor-director duo Asif Raza Mir and Babar Javed, A&B Productions was launched in August 2009 and has skyrocketed since then to become Pakistan’s second-largest television studio after Moomal Productions, an exclusive content provider to Hum Television Network, Pakistan’s second largest entertainment network by revenue.

Irked by its sliding ratings and revenues, Jang Group’s owners, the Rehman family, decided to shake up the management at Geo Entertainment last month, firing its head Badar Ikram and two other senior executives, as well as several other junior staff members. The move to partner with A&B Productions appears to be the next phase in trying to regain the mantle as Pakistan’s most-watched entertainment cable channel. It remains unclear if A&B will be able to continue to sell content to channels other than Geo after this agreement goes into effect.

“Geo Entertainment was having problems with content, and this move might help solve that,” said Shiraz Ahmed Kazi, former associate director for strategy and programming at Geo Entertainment, one of the three top executives who were asked to leave last month.

Having said that, Kazi did identify risks. “A&B’s success rate is lower than the 80% that is being claimed. Their aggregate success rate is closer to 50%, so this move is still a risk for Geo,” said Kazi, referring to a metric that measures the likelihood that a television show will be profitable for a channel.

The television industry appears to operate on the same model as the mining industry: winners pay for losers. A television show that costs around Rs9 million to produce may be sold by a studio to a channel for around Rs20 million.

“Most shows are not profitable. The few that are can earn a channel between Rs50 and Rs60 million in gross revenue,” said Ali Masood, an independent television and telefilm director who has previously worked with both Geo and Moomal. “Superhit television shows like Humsafar [which aired on Hum TV in 2011-12] can earn a channel as much as Rs150 million in revenue, but those are rare and unpredictable.”

The partnership between Geo and A&B, as well as the relationship between Moomal and Hum TV, replicate a model that was started in South Asia by Balaji Telefilms, which allied itself with Star Plus in India.

The model relies on a simple premise: having an alliance with a television channel provides a guaranteed revenue stream to the studio, which is then able to attract and retain high quality talent in writing, acting, directing, and other specialisations in the television industry.

A successful television show requires not just one element to work, but all elements to work together. Independent studios may be able to hire a good writer, for example, but may not be able to match him or her with a good director or actors, resulting in a good script going to waste. A studio that provides financial security, on the other hand, will have established relationships with top talent in each field, and will thus be more likely to bring together all of the elements of a good show.

After Hum TV and Geo Entertainment, it is not yet clear which other channels will be able to enter into partnerships with other studios. ARY Digital is the most directly affected channel, since its entire success has been based largely on shows produced by A&B Productions.

“There really are no other big studios out there in Pakistan, though the next one in line for a similar deal might be actor Humayun Saeed’s Seven Sky,” said Masood. “While their production volume is currently not high enough, If a channel like ARY were to partner with Seven Sky, they might be able to ratchet up production.”

Should this trend continue in the industry, experts say that the quality of television shows in Pakistan will improve, as more talented people are paired up with each other to produce better content. In addition, each channel will begin to acquire unique characteristics.

“Currently, with A&B shows on every channel, all of the entertainment channels look the same. When they begin to enter into partnerships [with studios], each channel will acquire its own personality,” said Masood.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 10^th, 2013.

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