(Bloomberg) — On a breezy April evening some 45,000 Indian Premier League cricket fans are packed into Wankhede Stadium to watch the hometown Mumbai Indians battle the Rajasthan Royals.
Elsewhere in the city, hundreds of employees of Viacom18 Media Pvt. are on different mission, transmitting the match in 12 languages and 20 camera angles across the world’s most-populous country.
“We are targeting over 600 million people to come and watch,” said Uday Shankar, the executive behind the effort.
Once an underdog dwarfed by foreign behemoths, Viacom18 and its JioCinema streaming service are poised to become the most powerful player in the $28 billion Indian media and entertainment industry. Reliance Industries Ltd., Viacom18’s largest shareholder, has plans to merge the business with Walt Disney Co.’s India operations, adding dozens of cable TV channels and tens of millions of streaming subscribers in a deal valuing the combined enterprise at $8.5 billion.
With everything from local news to big Hollywood films, the new company aims to capture not just a bigger share of TV ad sales, but the growing digital revenue now going to tech giants like YouTube and Meta Platforms Inc. Viacom18 could also become a broader rival to Amazon.com Inc. if it follows through on plans to integrate e-commerce into its streaming platform.
Shankar, the 61-year-old executive who’s going to lead Viacom18 as vice chairman, is a media veteran. A former journalist, he helped turn Star India into a prized asset for the Murdoch family, which then sold their entertainment assets to Disney in 2019. Now he’s overseeing the group buying back that business. His role as a bridge between Hollywood and Bollywood will make him a key player in the media strategy being implemented by Reliance, a company with interests from energy to telecommunications.
“He’s one of the most talented media executives in the world, not just in India,” said James Murdoch, who partnered with Shankar in Bodhi Tree Systems, an investment firm that owns a piece of Viacom18. “Uday has a great track record of being able to move businesses forward, and we’re excited to see it continue.”
India isn’t a market where others have been able to move forward so easily, despite the country’s economic growth.
Disney, for example, acquired a large business there when it bought 21st Century Fox’s entertainment assets in 2019. But pricey bidding wars for cricket rights and a paltry $1.28-a-month in revenue per streaming subscriber has made profitability hard to come by. In a bid to bulk up, Sony Group sought to merge its Indian business with local rival Zee Entertainment, only to see the deal fall apart earlier this year.
With the backing of Mukesh Ambani, Reliance’s chairman and Asia’s richest person, Shankar thinks he can achieve a different outcome, building a profitable streaming business in large part by offering ad-supported programing. It helps, he said, that he was born and raised in the country.
“India is like a continent,” he said in an interview at his office in the southern port area of Mumbai. “Many people have come in and found it difficult to build a big business, but for us, we are from India.”
Among his boldest bets, letting cricket fans stream the premier league for free on JioCinema, a move that attracted 449 million viewers and more than 17 billion views last season. Shankar is offering free IPL live streaming again this year.
The goal is to develop the market for mobile streaming in India and particularly the associated advertising, since most of the company’s customers subscribe to the ad-supported version. Digital ad revenue will come not only from the English- and Hindi-speaking population, but also from regions that have their own languages and purchasing habits.
Sports streams garnered 70% of their viewership from small towns last year, and most of viewers were in the 18-to-44-year-old demographic most coveted by advertisers, according to a report from the consulting firm EY. And while advertising in India’s $4 billion traditional TV market is shrinking, the digital advertising market is projected to more than double to about $20 billion in the next five years, Shankar said.
“You need to make sure that digital offerings are available to smallest of the small advertisers,” he said. “That’s the model that we believe in.”
Read More: Booming India Prepares to Take China’s Global Growth Crown
All of this takes work of course. Back at Viacom18’s newly opened production hub, engineers in a massive control room monitor screens on multiple platforms to spot glitches and fix them in seconds. Separate screens receive live feeds of viewer consumption. On top of the studios, a giant data center supports the video feeds, all part of Shankar’s obsession with the product.
“He spent 80% of the time on tech just to ensure that we have a service which doesn’t crash,” said Prateek Garg, managing director at Marigold Park Capital, an affiliate of Bodhi Tree.
Growing up in a small rural town in India, Shankar studied economic history with a goal of learning how to influence Indian society. He found journalism the closest answer to his career goal and joined the Times of India as a political reporter. He later became one of the founding editors of New Delhi-based environmental magazine, Down to Earth. In 1991, he was shocked by CNN’s live broadcasting of the first Gulf War.
“It blew my mind,” Shankar said. “My wife got frustrated with my obsession with TV and told me, ‘Instead of watching it, why don’t you go and do something?’”
He managed to get his first TV job at a network and spent more than four years building a 24-hour live news channel called Aaj Tak before joining the Murdoch family’s Star News as chief executive officer in 2004.
“One thing I knew as a journalist was I knew who was a good expert and how to go to that person to ask the right questions,” Shankar said.
The journalism skills helped him turn around Star News, and his work stood out. In 2007, he took over as CEO of Star India, the choice of Chairman Rupert Murdoch to the lead the company’s entire operation in that country.
“He gave me the license to make mistakes because I was untested,” Shankar said. The corporate DNA of Fox was “go create the market and then you make money in the market.”
India was just beginning to roll out 3G wireless service and had almost no Wi-Fi or broadband access. Shankar’s team started building a streaming platform called Hotstar and he went to every telecom company, begging for partnerships.
“They all rejected the idea and it was one of the most humiliating experiences I’ve ever had,” he said.
The efforts finally paid off after Hotstar offered the International Cricket Council World Cup for free in 2015, with a catchphrase “get over TV.”
It was a beginning of a digital revolution, with Ambani’s Reliance Jio telecom business launching 4G service with free data plans. The two Indian businessmen teamed up to jointly market Hotstar and Reliance Jio, which has since become the largest wireless carrier in India with 471 million subscribers.
Shankar rose to president of 21st Century Fox’s Asia business in 2017, overseeing all of the company’s operations in the region. By the time Fox sold its assets to Disney two years later, Star India’s value had soared to around $15 billion. Disney CEO Bob Iger gave Shankar the top job in Asia, leading the launch of its Disney+ streaming service in the region.
Shankar felt more comfortable in an entrepreneurial setting and joined James Murdoch, his old boss at Star India, to form Bodhi Tree. They raised $1.5 billion from the Qatar Investment Authority and others to invest in media deals including Viacom18 and an education technology startup.
Under Shankar’s guidance, JioCinema has been licensing films and TV programing from major Hollywood studios including Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal and Paramount Global, which is selling its 13% stake in Viacom18 to Reliance.
Disney’s lucrative library will be soon onboard with the merger. The new company will have more than 100 TV channels and two streaming services, capturing about 35% of India’s total TV viewership and 45% of the premium video-streaming business, excluding YouTube and Facebook.
It’s not just movies and TV coming from Disney. The merged entity will also have IPL rights, along with the TV and digital rights to the International Cricket Council’s Cricket World Cup, part of a package of sports that will cost about $2 billion annually, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The research firm Media Partners Asia estimated that the combined businesses lost about $200 million on sales of $2.8 billion in the fiscal year ended in March. Profitability in the traditional TV entertainment business was overtaken by the red ink in sports and streaming.
“The overall business will be loss-making but if you bring the combined cost structure together, they’ll have more synergies and bargaining power,” said Media Partners founder Vivek Couto. The digital advertising revenue will continue to grow along with the growth of India’s economy over the next five years. “After the hard work’s done, let’s say in 12 to 24 months, they should become a pretty profitable scale business,” he said.
Besides capturing multilanguage sub markets, JioCinema aims to build its business around the cricket experience, starting with selling mobile emoji packs featuring IPL cricket stars. It’s a first step to getting consumers accustomed to digital wallets, Marigold executive Garg said. Viacom18 hired Google veteran Kiran Mani to build out the mobile business.
Its content strategy is opposite that of Amazon and Netflix, which pump out big-budget series in India. Shankar’s strategy is to produce inexpensive 30-minute soap operas every day to capture the audience and boost the number of daily active users, a key metric in digital advertising. Eventually, that online viewing will replace traditional TV.
“I’m a big believer in change,” Shankar said. “Sometimes it can be unnerving, it can be difficult, but eventually, I believe it leads all of us to a better place.”
NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.
The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.
“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”
More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.
Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.
The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.
However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.
Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.
“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.
What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.
In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.
Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.
Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.
Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.
However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.
Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.
Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)
There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.
“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.
That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.
Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.
“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.
Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.
When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.
The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.
The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.
Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.
Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.
Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.
(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.
The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.
After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.
Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.
Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.
“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.
Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.
But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.
Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.
Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.
Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.
That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.
Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.
Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.
