India’s digital TV rollout is well underway, paving the way for more money to be reinvested in more shows across more channels.

India’s broadcast majors, however, show little inclination to diversify content strategies just yet. If anything, they are focusing on mass market plays instead, more attuned to an analog present than a digital future.

New Hindi entertainment channels from some of India’s biggest broadcasters – Sony, Viacom18 and Zee – are joining an already large and well-established genre.

It’s the start of an interim transitional phase in India’s ongoing TV transformation, where broadcasters are more likely to hunker down than pursue distant trophies.

Content producers and investors waiting patiently for India’s programming renaissance should take note.

The road ahead is clearly signposted but far from smooth. Although 22 million cable homes now have digital set-top boxes – pushing digital penetration past one in three pay-TV homes – components such as subscriber registration and direct billing, also essential for new business models, have been slower to follow suit.

At the same time, shifting timelines for digital migration outside major cities, accounting for most analog TV homes, combined with the evolution of alternative distribution platforms, make the tipping point hard to call.

New regulations disbanding JV channel aggregators (another relic of an analog era) will also leave smaller broadcasters – including international players such as Discovery, Disney and Turner – more exposed to the vagaries of the market.

Domestic leaders such as Star and Zee have less to worry about.

Nonetheless, they are unlikely to adopt more defined content strategies for a few years yet, as the industry’s center of gravity slowly shifts from subscriber growth towards monetization – a trend that could trigger broadcast consolidation.

Only then will networks have a clear view of how best to turn digital dreams into reality.

This article first appeared in Media Business Asia magazine, Q2 2014.