Industry overview Terrestrial television in India started with the experimental telecast starting in Delhi on 15 September 1959 (official

launch date) with a small transmitter and a makeshift studio. The regular daily transmission started in 1965 as a part of All India Radio. The television service was extended to Bombay and Amritsar in 1972. Up until 1975, only seven Indian cities had a television service. Television services were separated from radio in 1976. National telecasts were introduced in 1982. In the same year, colour TV was introduced in the Indian market. Indian small screen programming started off in the early 1980s. At that time there was only one national channel Doordarshan, which was government owned. The Ramayana and Mahabharata (both Indian spiritual & mythological stories) were the first major television series produced. This serial notched up the world record in viewership numbers for a single program. By the late 1980s more and more people started to own television sets. Though there was a single channel, television programming had reached saturation. Hence the government opened up another channel which had part national programming and part regional. This channel was known as DD 2 later DD Metro. Both channels were broadcast terrestrially.

The childrens genre has emerged as the largest viewership segment after Indias general entertainment channel (GEC) sector. The segment comprised 18.3 per cent of the viewership among 414 year olds in 2011, as compared to 16.9 per cent in 2010. Advertising revenue generated by the childrens genre totaled Rs 2.4 billion in 2011, up from Rs 2 billion in 2010. This is attributed to the growth in the viewership in the childrens genre from 43 million in 2010 to 48 million in 2011. This segment focuses on its target audience through a total of 14 channels in the age groups of 24 years and 414 years, comprising the majority of the market, as well as 1418 years. The cartoons and animation genre is the most popular and accounted for 85 per cent of TV viewership ratings (TVR) in the genre in 2011. Childrens programming comprised 12 per cent of the market and feature films 2 per cent of the total TVR in 2011.The childrens entertainment genre has evolved in the last few years since when Cartoon Network was the only channel for children in India. The number of channels dedicated to them has been increasing in the past few years with the launch of new channels such as Nick, Hungama, Pogo, Spacetoon and Khushi TV by domestic and foreign players. CBeebies, launched by BBC in 2010, focuses exclusively on children below the age of six years.

Animation series in television About 20 minutes into the movie Arjun: The Warrior Prince, a courtier running a swayamvar in the Kingdom of Panchal roars: "Have the mothers of earth stopped giving birth to brave men?" That could be as much a call to arms to the dream merchants of Indian animation, as to the able-bodied men vying for the hand of the doeeyed Princess Panchali. For, only the brave will make animation movies in India given the unproven market. "We believe that Arjun sets a new benchmark both in the sheer quality of animation and, even more importantly, in the quality of storytelling. It is a film that can be enjoyed by the whole family even without them knowing the story of the Mahabharata," says Siddharth Roy Kapur, Managing Director, Disney-UTV Studios, a Mumbai production-to-broadcasting house controlled by The Walt Disney Co. Kapur is not being gushy. Arjun has flashes of exceptional animation quality, depth of sound and even the occasional richness of narrative. 25. The story of Arjun, said to cost Rs 30 crore, making it one of the most expensive animated productions in the country, shines the spotlight on the conundrum that is Indian animation. The film is the first animated production in India to be co-branded with Disney, the $41-billion US company's first deep dive into a market that has a voracious appetite for feature films - the country releases around three a day as well as the world's largest population of children (400 million Indians are younger than 15).

All this should make for a market paved with gold for the iconic diversified media company, right? No. Ask Rajiv Chilakalapudi, Chilaka to friends. The animation entrepreneur from Hyderabad may have spent onetenth Arjun's budget on his maiden film but he is no less anxious than his peers at Disney.

Ahead of Chhota Bheem And The Curse of Damyaan hitting theatres on May 18, Chilaka said what gave him hope is the central character of his production. Chhota Bheem, the main role in the eponymous animation series he created for television, is one of the most successful shows for children in India. Coproduced by his company Green Gold Animation and Turner International India, it has been a regular on Turner's Pogo channel since 2008.

For a leading animation series, Green Gold's revenues are surprisingly anaemic: around Rs 20 crore in 2011/12, though up from Rs 4 crore in 2007/08 (see Slow Progress). The entire Indian animation industry, including work outsourced to India, in fact, is not worth more than Rs 1,130 crore, according to the FICCI-KPMG Indian Media and Entertainment Industry Report 2012. That is not even a speck on the $122-billion global market for animation and gaming; smaller countries like Korea and Malaysia have bigger and deeper animation industries. Disney alone had animation revenues of around $10 billion in 2011.