Bloomberg TV’s woes in India continue

BloombergQuint is Bloomberg’s third — and most expensive — failed attempt to build a TV brand in India, reports Harveen Ahluwalia of The Morning Context.

Ahluwalia reports, “However small it may be in terms of revenue share, the media business, especially the TV arm, is still important. And this is where Bloomberg has been extremely jinxed in India. One after the other, the company has always found itself stranded, working with a new strategy and a new partner every few years.

“Bloomberg TV entered India in 2009 in a tie-up with the business news channel UTVi (owned by media entrepreneur Ronnie Screwvala’s media company UTV), which was later rebranded as Bloomberg-UTV. It was the kind of licensing deal that any foreign news brand would give an arm and perhaps a leg for.

“During the early 2000s, business news was a highly untapped market, with just one channel CNBC-TV18—a partnership between NBCUniversal-owned CNBC and TV18, the broadcast arm of Bahl’s Network18—controlling most of the viewership. In subsequent years, almost every news network in the country built a presence in the segment: NDTV Profit, Zee Business, ET Now and then UTVi.”

Read more here.