Media executive and entrepreneur Uday Shankar has played a key role in the transformation of entertainment and media in India and the Asia–Pacific region over the past three decades. After getting his start in journalism, Shankar transitioned to the entertainment business in 2007 as CEO of Star India, part of News Corp. He later went on to hold executive roles at 21st Century Fox (Asia) and Disney (Asia–Pacific). While at Star, Shankar created a slew of pioneering television content for India, including a first-of-its-kind talk show, Satyamev Jayate, which tackled socially relevant issues such as alcoholism and female infanticide. Shankar also transformed televised cricket coverage in India and popularized the Indian-origin sport kabaddi, helping make it the second-most-viewed spectator sport in India after cricket. Under Shankar’s leadership, Star launched the video-streaming platform Hotstar (now Disney+ Hotstar).
In 2022, Shankar and James Murdoch teamed up to form the investment platform Bodhi Tree Systems, which recently entered a strategic alliance with Reliance Industries to help reimagine the streaming-service JioCinema. India’s key regulatory bodies recently greenlit Disney and Reliance’s proposed $8.5 billion merger of their Indian entertainment businesses; Shankar is set to to take over as vice-chair of the joint venture, which will be India’s largest media and entertainment company.
In an expansive interview with McKinsey senior partner Ramdoss Seetharaman and McKinsey Global Publishing leader Raju Narisetti, Shankar outlines his leadership journey, discusses the strategic rationale behind the impending merger, and offers insights on India’s evolving media and entertainment landscape. Condensed and edited excerpts from their conversation follow.
On how a journalism background influences problem-solving
If you’re a good journalist, and a serious one, one of the things that you do very well is you look at a problem, analyze that problem, and then identify who the best people are to find an answer to that problem. And you go to them and challenge them. You try and see where they’re leading you, or where they’re not right.
That is what I have done. I focus closely on a problem, break it down into its tiniest pieces, and then sit with the best minds to see how to crack the problem. I still use what I learned from my days as a reporter and editor to push my team to get out of their comfort zone, look at a problem, analyze it, and find solutions that most people have not found.
Also, as a journalist, you look for the big, bold headlines. Nobody comes for the 18th story; people come for the first two or three stories. Similarly, if you solve a small problem or many small problems, the effort is the same as, if not more than, solving a bigger problem. It tends to exhaust the team and makes them impatient because they don’t see great results, appreciation, or value creation.
I realized that I had a choice between doing too many things or doing a few things and creating disproportionate impact. And that’s worked for me. In fact, I get very unsettled in situations where executives and my leaders start doing too many things. In all the roles that I have played in the last 15 years, the big value that I have added for my teams is to push them to do less, but with greater impact.
On Satyamev Jayate and socially relevant entertainment
[Bollywood star] Aamir Khan had worked in a film called Three Idiots, which was a big success and also very socially relevant—and that got my attention. When I took over Star, it was an entertainment network, where entertainment was big in terms of business but much smaller in relevance. And I came from the news, which is small in terms of business but much bigger in relevance.
So that’s how the journey started: I was looking to do something on an entertainment platform that would make it relevant. Aamir had never done TV, and it took a long time to persuade him. Once he became interested, he created the framework, which was designed to prove that entertainment doesn’t have to be frivolous.
Satyamev Jayate was a risk. There are two ways to deal with that. One is, as the CEO, you would just say, “This is what I want to do.” And I think with that approach, the risk of failure becomes much greater. The other is to get the organization on board—which is what we did.
The first few conversations with my leadership team were not easy. I remember my CFO telling me that he didn’t understand why we were doing the talk show. It took a long time to explain it to everybody, but I’m never in a hurry to do things. Sometimes my bosses get impatient at the speed of my decision making, but I stay with the problem for a long time and use that time to get everybody on board and resolve all the doubts and questions in their minds.
I’m also a big believer that when you’re doing something “different,” then each link in that whole chain must be different. In the case of Satyamev Jayate, we completely discarded the usual playbook. The show had disruptive content, but it was also supported by very disruptive marketing, promotion, and selling. And it went on to become very, very big.
On reimagining sports coverage in India
Taking cricket ‘local’
We persuaded Fox global leadership to let us buy out the ESPN stake in their business, which people thought was crazy. If you looked at the financial case for that business, it was losing money hand over fist. But I recognized a joint-venture business wasn’t designed for the people of India. To give you an example: maybe 85 percent of cricket commentary used to be in English in a country where an estimated 3 percent of people are comfortable with English. And most of the remaining 15 percent of the commentary was in Hindi.
That’s because the wisdom among all the established sports broadcasters then was that nobody was interested in the commentary; nobody was interested in the content. They just wanted to see the action on the ground. But that’s like saying that the soundtrack of a movie is irrelevant. So there was an opportunity there.
I’ve always been a big believer in local languages. Even for the news, I was one of the first people to push for regional-language news channels. Then, in entertainment, Star was very big, but Star was limited to Hindi and a little bit of English. When we took over, we went market after market in every major Indian language, and we launched channels there. And today, Star’s leadership is rock-solid because of that.
So we thought, why couldn’t that model work for sports? My first conversation with my then-boss James Murdoch didn’t last long, because everyone thought, “If ESPN is struggling, why does it make sense for somebody who has no experience to get involved?”
But we flipped it and said, “No, it’s not about sports; it’s about people.”
My team worked on it for two years and came up with a plan. Today, less than 10 percent of sports consumption in India is in English. It’s gone so deep that now we are doing it at JioCinema and other places where content includes regional dialects, not just languages.
Kabaddi: The next big spectator sport
The experience with kabaddi was a little different from cricket.
While televising cricket worked very well, and continues to work, the short cycle of ownership [of broadcasting rights] was always a concern because it works against you: the more the property works for you, the more you have to pay in the next cycle. I wasn’t happy about that. How long could we keep buying or leasing rights for a few years, and then go back and keep paying more?
We needed to develop other sports. So I asked, “What is the one sport that everybody knows about?” And the answer was kabaddi.
Again, because we had been thinking about it for so long, we understood that the game had great energy and potential and great viewership appeal. But the one key problem we realized we had to solve was that it wasn’t urban enough. There was no formal reporting or commentary or television coverage; it had no formal narrative. It didn’t have a language of its own; it didn’t have idioms and phrases.
And we said, “We’ll do all that.”
Kabaddi remains one of the most satisfying things that we as a group accomplished at Star. The response surprised even us. About 400 million to 500 million people watched it in its inaugural year.
One other part of it was equally satisfying. A large number of people, including the captain of the Indian national team, used to work in agricultural fields, because even though kabaddi was well-known—it’s an event in the Asian Games—you couldn’t make a career out of it. Now, more than 250 people have made a living out of kabaddi, making anything from $50,000 to as much as $100,000 or more from the sport. And that motivated the team: the opportunity to drive real change, both on the business side and also in terms of social impact—because then the layers of satisfaction become so much deeper.
On making Hotstar the most-watched streaming service in India
Moving away from the ‘big screen’
The story of Hotstar began around 2010 to 2012, when more and more people started watching content online. The internet had come to India, but there was no broadband, and there were no smartphones. People would get dongles, download content on a pen drive, and plug it in.
One of the things that I realized from my travels around the country and my connectivity to broader India was that many people in this country had completely bypassed the television phase. Many of them were part of a mobile workforce and had come to big cities from small towns or villages. Their living conditions didn’t permit them to own a TV, yet they wanted to consume content.
Platforms like Netflix and Amazon hadn’t yet come to India, and all those solutions were for the big screen. We realized that “big screen” was not the way to go here: we had to solve for the people of the country.
Creating content for the majority
At that point, most of the mobile handsets in the country were Android. Apple was not as popular in India back then, and connected TVs hadn’t arrived yet. So we decided to design for Android phones. Some people would not get to watch it, but I have no interest in doing anything that appeals only to a small, elite group of people. It was the same with Hotstar.
Just to give you an example, for the longest time, Hotstar did not have a solution for iPad. Our global competitors all had great iPad solutions. But my team was very clear. I remember having a conversation with my chief product officer and saying, “You know, it’s really embarrassing for me to go into a meeting where people say, ‘Oh, you guys don’t have a solution for iPad.’”
And he said, “Our deal was to create something that is the most-watched streaming service in the country. No part of my deal with you is to not embarrass you in front of your friends.”
And I thought that was fair and backed off. But that’s the thing: half the time, we want to design for our peer group even if we keep saying that we want to design for the market. You have to be very, very disciplined about that. That’s what we kept at the core of Hotstar. We made sure that anyone who did not have access to content was the first one to get that content.
So Hotstar was a solution designed for very low-cost Android phones in a data-challenged environment. The first stream of Hotstar was designed so that even if you didn’t get any video, the audio stream would continue.
Predicting the market
Everybody was saying, “The market is not ready,” because, back then, data in India was Rs 250 to Rs 300 [$3.00 to $4.00] per gigabyte as compared with Rs 9 [$0.10] per gigabyte now. This was before the Jio [data streaming] revolution. But I knew that the country was not going to be data-starved for too long; I had heard what the telecom companies were doing. Back then, every telecom company had the ambition to build something in streaming. Therefore, they had the pipe, and they could just push the water through it.
We said, “First and foremost, let’s get the market ready with the idea of consuming content on a mobile device, and then we will figure out how to monetize it.” That’s remained my approach: first you get people to accept the product, then you figure out how to charge them.
We wanted to create a solution that was ready if the market technology gave us an opportunity. And we got that opportunity when Jio was launched. With that, data became cheap and ubiquitous—and we had the high-quality, premium content, which a large segment of this country’s population hadn’t had access to until then. So it just happened at the right time.
On the pending Reliance–Disney merger
Everybody knows that the media market is going through a huge transition. And while India is one of the few markets where television still has reasonably good health, within that, a lot of it is changing. Connected TVs and handheld devices have become very substantial and mainstream.
You’re competing with global players: Google and Meta. Most of digital-advertising revenue goes to these two companies. So you need to pivot; you need to create a business. We saw an opportunity to leverage our inherent strengths and make that strategic pivot. That’s the primary rationale for the merger.
The other thing is that, on the streaming side, there’s an opportunity to innovate and disrupt the monetization models. If you continue to push only SVOD [subscription video on demand] and AVOD [advertising-based video on demand] revenues, you’re limited. While there are a lot of people today who are willing to pay for content and who are interesting or important to advertisers, there are also a lot of people who are not relevant for either of these models. You need to create unique or native monetization models to create value from that base.
Whoever manages to create new revenue streams definitely has an advantage. So I think all these opportunities exist.
On India’s challenges and opportunities
What Western media companies don’t get about India
Many Western companies haven’t succeeded in India primarily because, even before they board the flight to India, their strategy is very clear in their heads, and that is often a global strategy that has been defined by a team that has never been to India or doesn’t know India. They look at India as the headline value of a population of 1.4 billion people. But if you look under the hood, barely 60 million people or so fall into the “affluent” category [with an income of greater than $10,000].
So which India do Western companies want to address? They come here for the 1.4 billion people but start designing solutions for 60 million people or less—that’s where the big mismatch is. And this insight becomes clear very quickly. However, they don’t want to change that strategy, for whatever reason—sometimes it’s a conviction about their strategy, sometimes because it causes global dissonance in their business model.
Fox was different because though it had the financial discipline of a multinational—a core behavioral conduct that was globally designed—it believed in local talent, local strategy, and local business models. That allowed us to do things. So while Fox was building digital products in the US and in other parts of the world to compete with Western streaming services, in India, we designed something that was completely tailored to Indian requirements and Indian conditions.
All big, successful global companies eventually get there, but it’s a journey.
India’s macroeconomic opportunity
India’s secular growth profile will continue to be very strong and attractive. For a country that has wallowed in a lack of opportunities and has hoped that things would get better, I notice now that people have decided to take charge of their own lives. That has unleashed an entrepreneurial energy and self-confidence in many people. Most Indians believe that they deserve a better tomorrow—maybe not necessarily for them, but for the next generation. For that, they need to take matters into their own hands. They cannot wait for a government or for a system to deliver.
When the government gives them support, they’re happy to take it, but that’s not what they count on. I think that’s why, for every problem, Indians are beginning to find solutions that are uniquely Indian. These solutions may not necessarily work in the developed world and may not be appreciated everywhere, but they are robust and they solve or improve the quality of life for a lot of people.
There is a consensus in this country that we have a greater destiny. Behind all the political strife, squabbles, and competitiveness, there is a focus on development, growth, and creating a better tomorrow. The political class knows that people are getting more and more restless. If you talk to political leaders today, nobody can confidently tell you that they would get reelected. That’s very healthy, and it can be a very powerful force to unleash because then they have to be creative about how to benefit a broader section of their voters.
So, I remain very optimistic about this country.
The role of education in India’s future
The importance of education in India relates to my point that people have decided to take charge of their own destinies. I come from a very underdeveloped part of the country. I’m sitting here only because I received a good education. Therefore, in some form, education has always been on my mind as my way to give back.
So when James Murdoch and I decided to come together and create an investment platform called Bodhi Tree, our first major educational investment was in a company called Allen Career Institute.
For 35 years, Allen has been teaching students physics, chemistry, biology, and mathematics, because students need to qualify in these subjects to get into medical and engineering programs. Allen has prepared about 2.5 million students for medical or engineering college entrance exams. And we thought, what if the company could be powered by digital technology that didn’t just solve for delivering the content but actually addressed learning and educational outcomes? Because that is what should happen in an ideal classroom. And now, machine learning, AI, and other digital technologies have enabled us to create an effective intervention in a broken educational system by making Allen a destination for people who want to learn—and not just get educational content delivered to them.
I wanted to create a for-profit model because while I like the sentiment of a not-for-profit model, I’m not a big believer in it, because when you have to ask for money from someone else, you’re limited. I’ve always believed that for-profit models can be very honorable and good for society. Every year, we have about 25 million people entering the educational system, and it’s no longer a factor of how much people can pay: the willingness to pay for education among Indian parents is probably unprecedented. People are willing to cut any cost, but they want to pay for their children.
Yet they’re still not getting a decent education because consumer demand for education in India has outpaced the efforts to build capacity for that demand. That’s where we thought technology was a very good instrument to solve that problem—because the only way you can do that for the 300 million students of this country is through technology.
On hiring and team building
Creating a strong team
I look very sharply at what value somebody brings to the table. I don’t see a lot of value in a person who has done multiple things and has done them only “reasonably well.”
My approach to hiring is a bit like a cricket team’s coach. I need to know: What will this person do on the team? Will this person be a batsman or a bowler? Will they be a right-handed batsman or a left-handed batsman? Will they be great against spin or great against fast bowling? I need to know the one thing that the person should be able to do better than everyone else. Then you build complementary skills—that’s how you build a team.
To give you an example, when I first came to Star, which was my first big job as a CEO, I knew that I understood a little bit about content and consumers. But I didn’t know finance, I didn’t know sales, and I didn’t know marketing in the traditional sense. So I hired the people I thought were really good at that. And we had a very clear compact in the team that the person who’s really great at something would take the lead but would be challenged very heavily by common sense.
Looking past labels
I don’t go by labels, and I don’t like to hire managers who just look at a P&L [profit and loss]. I like to know what is the one thing that I can count on this person for.
For example, a person on my team was responsible for acquiring the films we showed on our channels. That person was totally not corporate trained, but he had one unique ability: he thought disruptively. Acquiring TV rights involved huge bidding wars that would go on forever. It was tough.
Until one day, this person said to me, “I have a different idea. The biggest value in India sits with the top actor. Why don’t we bypass the producer and make a deal with the actor? The actor doesn’t charge the producer any money, and we agree to give the actor a fee for the films. The producer will like it because it reduces the cash burden on them. The actor gets money, and we are preempting everybody.”
We signed the first such deal with top Indian actor Salman Khan for five years. So any studio or producer who wanted to do a film with him had no choice but to agree to give that film to us. This created huge disruption because even if broadcasters had preexisting deals with studios and producers, it didn’t matter.
That’s the kind of differentiated thinking that I like. That person is amazing, but I don’t think he would get hired in a button-down corporate setup.
On leadership lessons from business icons
All the leaders I’ve worked with are unique in their own ways. I’ve learned from each one of them: from Rupert, James, and Lachlan [Murdoch], because I worked so closely and for such a long time with News Corp and Fox, and from Mr. Mukesh Ambani [of Reliance Industries], who I’ve known for a long time and am now working closely with.
The first thing is they’re all very clear about why they’re doing what they’re doing—and that clarity is very helpful. They all play to win. And they all have a high threshold for failure. They’re patient, and they’re not willing to give up.
And then, they all work on trust. They all take their bets on people. And once they trust people, they’re willing to back them up. And I learned that myself. I take my bets on people; I trust them once they earn my trust. And I back them up.
Watch the full interview
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