(HT)
Reliance Industries (RIL) Chairman Mukesh Ambani on Thursday expressed the hope that India’s media and entertainment industry will grow five times to over a $100 billion in the next decade.
Ambani who was speaking on the first day of the inaugural WAVES summit being held at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai, addressed a session, “Building the Next Global Entertainment Revolution from India”. “India’s media and entertainment industry today stands at $28 billion. We can easily grow this five times to over $100 billion in the next decade. This will give birth to huge new opportunities in employment and entrepreneurship in diverse fields,” he said.
“To achieve this, India should invest in state-of-the-art content clusters across the country. We should train tens of thousands of our talented young people in animation, VFX and other technologies; we should incentivise IP creation, look at AI-powered innovation and gamification. We should create new investment avenues for this industry, and create an enabling, encouraging and empowering regulatory environment that rewards imagination and inclusion,” he said.
He called upon young content creators to say the best among them need to start thinking of the world as a market and start creating content for global audiences. “We should forge partnerships and collaborations with innovative entrepreneurs, artists and studios from around the world,” he emphasised.
Ambani also spoke of the challenging role of artificial intelligence in the creative industry and disruptive influence. “AI tools are dissolving the barriers between dream and reality, between imagination and execution. They can make good content a thousand times more captivating and also take them simultaneously to hundreds of millions of screens in cinema halls, homes and on mobile phones and computers across geographies and languages. What AI is doing to entertainment now is a million times more revolutionary than what talking movies did to silent pictures a hundred years ago.”
Speaking separately at the summit’s inauguration on Thursday, Ambani spoke of India’s “vast treasure trove of timeless tales from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to folklore and classics in dozens of regional languages.” These stories, he said “touch people’s hearts around the world because they celebrate universal human values — brotherhood, compassion, courage, love, beauty.”
