AniBooks on TV
Broadcasting a Reading Experience for Children
AniBook screen shot -
Animated stories with Same Language Subtitling (SLS) can create a reading experience for millions of children.
There are 130 million children in India’s primary schools (Grades 1-5), spread across 600,000 villages. 40% will leave schooling before completing Grade 5. 60% of these school dropouts will be girls. Half the children starting primary education will not be able to read functionally, e.g., the headlines of a newspaper.
There are also 127 million children, below age six, likely to enter primary schooling with practically no pre-school preparation.
Most of the 257 million pre-school and in-school children will never experience reading from children’s books. Yet, over half of them will grow up watching cartoons on TV.
BookBox is a startup social venture, already producing AniBooks or animations with Same Language Subtitling (SLS) for digital media, in 18 languages (www.bookbox.com). BookBox will produce these AniBooks for TV, potentially targeting 80 million children in India. It will reach profitability in 3 years, then expand to other developing countries.
The Business
Product
BookBox innovated the concept of an AniBook, to create a reading experience for children, in an entertaining and audio-visual form. Essentially, the AniBooks are animated stories with the narration appearing on screen as perfectly synchronized and highlighted subtitles, in the same language as the audio. This reinforces text-sound associations that are typically weak among early-literate children.
Once created in any one language, BookBox AniBooks can be adapted to other languages at a marginal cost. Thus, BookBox AniBooks are well-suited to serve the diverse linguistic markets of broadcast TV in India and, over time, other countries.
BookBox has already created 12 AniBooks for digital media (e.g., DVD, download, CD, iPod). The same content will now be adapted for broadcast, and licensed for broadcast on various TV channels.
Customers
1) An important BookBox customer is expected to be the Government of India, especially its Language and Education Departments that have their own programming for broadcast. For examle, there is already a proposal in the final stages of acceptance for converting existing BookBox titles for broadcast, into Sanskrit.
2) Doordarshan, the national TV broadcaster will be another crucial customer because it requires programming in all the official languages. It is especially weak in children’s programming and has the public service goal of reading and literacy. Besides, PlanetRead already collaborates with Doordarshan on 10 weekly programmes and this is expected to enhance BookBox’s ability to license content to the national broadcaster.
3) These two customers will primarily constitute the financial sustainability base of BookBox. However, BookBox will market its content to a growing number of private channels in different states and languages. The growth in children’s TV programming in India began in 2001 with the entry of a number of private channels, such as, Cartoon Network, Pogo, Nickelodeon, Hungama, Splash, and Walt Disney. But they do not have content serving India's linguistic diversity.
In year one we expect to concentrate on the first two customers only and sell programming in at least six languages. We expect to employ 15 people, all in India.
Our SLS work for literacy has earned credibility among broadcast and education policy-makers in India, at the topmost level. At several points in the SLS project, we have received funding from the Department of Education, totalling €100,000, over the last 10 years. The national broadcaster has also collaborated with us to allow the implementation of SLS, presently on 7 TV programmes, in as many languages.
BookBox will build on this credibility, acquired over a decade of work with the government. Brij Kothari and a marketing executive in New Delhi will be leading the marketing effort with national agencies.
The product we have created is unique in offering an entertaining, reading experience to children. It is the only programming content we know of on TV in India that attempts to create a children's reading experience among pre-school and in-school children. Most content providers create standard cartoons for entertainment.
Our potential "competitor" is Sesame Workshop (Children's Television Workshop). CTW has recently entered the educational broadcast market in India. Here we see no need for competition, but collaboration.
PlanetRead is a business partner since it owns 10% of BookBox. PlanetRead already has broadcast editing facilities that would help in creating BookBox content. PlanetRead's well-known SLS work will help in marketing BookBox and building the BookBox brand. PlanetRead and BookBox operations are both co-located in Pondicherry and Mumbai, India, sharing office space and technical expertise.
The founders of BookBox have already invested €50,000 in BookBox to incorporate the company and set it up infrastructurally. BookBox has already produced 12 stories in the process in several languages, for the digital media.
We are in the process of finalizing the conversion of our existing AniBooks in Sanskrit, for the Language Department of the Govt. of India and that is expected to cover a fourth of the investment cost that has gone into BookBox so far. We would like to bootstrap for a while, with or without the BiD Challenge prize money and would like to get angel or VC funding from an agency that expects both social and financial returns.
Development
Given that we are producing media content, our project is not as much about local employment generation as it is about mass impact on reading. Much of our language-based work would contracted out, for example, to language experts.
One possible spin-off could be the encouragement of local story-writers, artistes, and musicians, as and when possible to accommodate in the production process. However, we would have to balance this with with the popularity of the AniBooks on TV because, ultimately, this will affect the financial sustainability of the project.
