Banking on Bachchan
Sony Entertainment Television needs a cracker of a programme to shake off stagnation.
Here is a little secret. Sony Entertainment Television (SET) wooed Amitabh Bachchan for six months to get him to host Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) again. Big B is a very busy man today, but SET had serious research findings to seek out Bachchan.
Cut to circa 2000 when, on a rainy evening in July, Bachchan started hosting the Indian version of television quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? It proved to be a double bonanza. In a matter of days Rupert Murdoch's Star Plus, on which KBC was being aired on prime time, raced past Zee Entertainment and Sony to the top.
KBC's first episode took the Star network flagship channel's market share up from two per cent to 25 per cent. And, yes, in the process Bachchan was born again professionally.
After 270 episodes that ran for 18 months, Bachchan was back in 2005 with KBC-2, which, although still popular, could never match the first season's success. According to television audience monitoring agency TAM Media Research, KBC in its first run had average television viewership rating, or TVR, points of 14.1 (one TVR represents 1 per cent viewership in the surveyed area in a given minute). The average for the second and third season (the third was hosted by Shah Rukh Khan) dropped to 11.1 points and 6.8 points, respectively. To buck that trend, the fourth season needs some serious thinking out of the idiot box.
Small wonder then that a circumspect Bachchan has taken his time to come back to the KBC hot seat - he will be in it on his 68th birthday on October 11, 2010. If bringing alive a fourth season seems daunting, what makes Big B's task even more of a challenge is that SET, the flagship channel of Multi Screen Media, or MSM, is a distant fourth behind the top three Hindi entertainment channels that can sniff each other on the charts (See Catch Up Time For Sony). MSM is the Indian arm of Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc, which had acquired the rights to Who Wants to be a Millionaire? in 2008.
Ajith Thakur, Executive Vice President and business head at SET, is the man in charge of content. Thakur, who had managed KwalityWalls for Hindustan Unilever before joining the television industry, swears by research. "The viewer response was unanimous that Bachchan should host KBC," he says. The research, targeted at women, also indicated that they wanted to watch television with their family, and KBC with Bachchan could bring the family together.
Thakur explains how KBC-4 is a lot speedier. The number of questions to Rs 1 crore has come down to 12 from 15. The first six questions have a time limit for answering. There are new lifelines, like an expert in the studio and a second chance to answer a question if the first answer is a mistake. And there will be just 36 episodes.
Can this tinkering recapture the magic? Sameer Nair, who first launched the show as programming head of Star Plus and is now CEO of Imagine TV, is not so sure. He says: "A decade ago KBC was one of a kind. Today it is just another show." Man Jit Singh, Chief Executive Officer of MSM, who took over from Kunal Dasgupta - the company's CEO for 14 years - in February 2009, does not disagree: "The television landscape has evolved in the last 10 years and we do not expect the same results. But we feel confident that KBC will yet again deliver a strong performance."
Advertisers have begun showing interest. At the time of writing, media planners told BT that 10-second advertisement slots were being sold for Rs 2.5 lakh-Rs 3 lakh. That is below the Rs 4 lakh per 10 second rate KBC commanded in its heyday, but is in line with what the leaders like Star Plus and Colors charge for primetime shows today. It is also almost three times the average of what Sony charges for 10-second slots for its popular serials. For KBC, Sony also has two presenting sponsors in Cadbury's and Idea Cellular and the KBC cash box already had Rs 100 crore 10 days before it went on air. SET is a year into a complete overhaul. It had inked a deal with Yash Raj Films for exclusive fiction and non-fiction content last year. New shows like Lift Kara De with Karan Johar and DJ's Creative Unit's Baat Hamaari Pakki Hai (which is still on) did help the channel cover some distance - from the 80 gross ratings points (GRPs) mark at the beginning of 2009 to a peak of 184 last fortnight. A GRP measures the cumulative size of the audience reached by a channel's programmes. But as MSM enters a new phase of ambitious growth it is banking on KBC-4 to steady its flagship channel SET (see Sony's Game Plan).
According to TAM's latest weekly data on general entertainment channels, or GECs, Star Plus (368 GRPs), Colors (273 GRPs) and Zee TV (237 GRPs) all better SET (184) in the week that ended on September 25. None of SET's serials figure in the top 10 ratings chart. A decade ago, it was a different story. In 1999-2000, before the launch of KBC-1 on Star Plus, SET had touched the No.1 spot, driven by shows like Aahat and CID. SET's channel share has dropped from a high of 18 per cent in 2004 to 11.7 per cent in 2010. But then comparisons with past viewership trends may be unfair. As advertising honcho Sam Balsara, head of Madison World, says: "As the number of channels available has gone up there has been a downward trend in ratings."
Sony may be behind the leaders but it has done well to more than double its GRPs in the past 21-odd months. "Earlier, our positioning was not clear. Now we have a clear positioning and a strategy for SET. It is a channel for women in the 15-34 age group, who are ambitious and yet progressive in their thinking," points out MSM COO N.P. Singh. Yet, more than Star, Colors and Zee, the channel that could embarrass SET the most is the one in its family, SAB TV, whose latest GRPs stood at 122 (see Funny Thing, Success, BT July 25). Man Jit Singh, though, sees little room for competition between the two.
" SAB has been performing brilliantly but the audience it targets is different from the predominantly women audience targeted by SET. We see the two channels complementing each other rather than cannibalising each other," explains Man Jit Singh. In meantime, MSM is also laying the ground work for new channels for sports and music.
Thakur says SET will continue to pioneer new TV formats with differentiated, disruptive scheduling and inclusive content. "My focus is on the future. We are backing KBC with two new fiction shows. After KBC, we will have a show called Saas Bina Sasural, a story of a girl married into a family of five men, says Thakur. Adds Man Jit Singh: "We believe our programming is bringing entirely new viewers to television. We expect this audience to grow and to set us apart."
Now it is up to the viewers to vindicate his faith.
Cut to circa 2000 when, on a rainy evening in July, Bachchan started hosting the Indian version of television quiz show Who Wants to be a Millionaire? It proved to be a double bonanza. In a matter of days Rupert Murdoch's Star Plus, on which KBC was being aired on prime time, raced past Zee Entertainment and Sony to the top.
KBC's first episode took the Star network flagship channel's market share up from two per cent to 25 per cent. And, yes, in the process Bachchan was born again professionally.
After 270 episodes that ran for 18 months, Bachchan was back in 2005 with KBC-2, which, although still popular, could never match the first season's success. According to television audience monitoring agency TAM Media Research, KBC in its first run had average television viewership rating, or TVR, points of 14.1 (one TVR represents 1 per cent viewership in the surveyed area in a given minute). The average for the second and third season (the third was hosted by Shah Rukh Khan) dropped to 11.1 points and 6.8 points, respectively. To buck that trend, the fourth season needs some serious thinking out of the idiot box.
| Sony's game plan Movies MSM operates seven channels fl agship Sony Entertainment Television, SAB, MAX, AXN, Animax, Sony PIX and AATH. It is seeing a 20 per cent growth year on year. PIX is gunning for a 25 per cent share of the market leveraging its tie up with Sony Pictures Entertainment for their blockbusters. Regional The company bought out a Bangla movie channel (Channel 8) in March 2009. "Only 1,000 Bengali fi lms have been made and we have 400 of those, and are still buying," says CEO Man Jit Singh. It also has a Tamil fi lm library of 380 fi lms and is interested in Bhojpuri fi lms, too. Sports MSM is also looking at a sports channel to cradle IPL. Currently, it uses Max as well as Sony Entertainment Television during IPL with Max positioned as a sports-cummovie channel. "We want to launch a premium sports channel but will not rush into a channel until we have the properties we need," says Singh Music Singh is keen on a music channel. MSM has applied for and is waiting for downlink permission from the I&B Ministry. "The genre of music will change through the day - it can be devotional in the mornings and pop for college kids at, say, 11 a.m. on Saturdays," says Singh. |
Ajith Thakur, Executive Vice President and business head at SET, is the man in charge of content. Thakur, who had managed KwalityWalls for Hindustan Unilever before joining the television industry, swears by research. "The viewer response was unanimous that Bachchan should host KBC," he says. The research, targeted at women, also indicated that they wanted to watch television with their family, and KBC with Bachchan could bring the family together.
Thakur explains how KBC-4 is a lot speedier. The number of questions to Rs 1 crore has come down to 12 from 15. The first six questions have a time limit for answering. There are new lifelines, like an expert in the studio and a second chance to answer a question if the first answer is a mistake. And there will be just 36 episodes.
Can this tinkering recapture the magic? Sameer Nair, who first launched the show as programming head of Star Plus and is now CEO of Imagine TV, is not so sure. He says: "A decade ago KBC was one of a kind. Today it is just another show." Man Jit Singh, Chief Executive Officer of MSM, who took over from Kunal Dasgupta - the company's CEO for 14 years - in February 2009, does not disagree: "The television landscape has evolved in the last 10 years and we do not expect the same results. But we feel confident that KBC will yet again deliver a strong performance."
Advertisers have begun showing interest. At the time of writing, media planners told BT that 10-second advertisement slots were being sold for Rs 2.5 lakh-Rs 3 lakh. That is below the Rs 4 lakh per 10 second rate KBC commanded in its heyday, but is in line with what the leaders like Star Plus and Colors charge for primetime shows today. It is also almost three times the average of what Sony charges for 10-second slots for its popular serials. For KBC, Sony also has two presenting sponsors in Cadbury's and Idea Cellular and the KBC cash box already had Rs 100 crore 10 days before it went on air. SET is a year into a complete overhaul. It had inked a deal with Yash Raj Films for exclusive fiction and non-fiction content last year. New shows like Lift Kara De with Karan Johar and DJ's Creative Unit's Baat Hamaari Pakki Hai (which is still on) did help the channel cover some distance - from the 80 gross ratings points (GRPs) mark at the beginning of 2009 to a peak of 184 last fortnight. A GRP measures the cumulative size of the audience reached by a channel's programmes. But as MSM enters a new phase of ambitious growth it is banking on KBC-4 to steady its flagship channel SET (see Sony's Game Plan).
According to TAM's latest weekly data on general entertainment channels, or GECs, Star Plus (368 GRPs), Colors (273 GRPs) and Zee TV (237 GRPs) all better SET (184) in the week that ended on September 25. None of SET's serials figure in the top 10 ratings chart. A decade ago, it was a different story. In 1999-2000, before the launch of KBC-1 on Star Plus, SET had touched the No.1 spot, driven by shows like Aahat and CID. SET's channel share has dropped from a high of 18 per cent in 2004 to 11.7 per cent in 2010. But then comparisons with past viewership trends may be unfair. As advertising honcho Sam Balsara, head of Madison World, says: "As the number of channels available has gone up there has been a downward trend in ratings."
Sony may be behind the leaders but it has done well to more than double its GRPs in the past 21-odd months. "Earlier, our positioning was not clear. Now we have a clear positioning and a strategy for SET. It is a channel for women in the 15-34 age group, who are ambitious and yet progressive in their thinking," points out MSM COO N.P. Singh. Yet, more than Star, Colors and Zee, the channel that could embarrass SET the most is the one in its family, SAB TV, whose latest GRPs stood at 122 (see Funny Thing, Success, BT July 25). Man Jit Singh, though, sees little room for competition between the two.
" SAB has been performing brilliantly but the audience it targets is different from the predominantly women audience targeted by SET. We see the two channels complementing each other rather than cannibalising each other," explains Man Jit Singh. In meantime, MSM is also laying the ground work for new channels for sports and music.
Thakur says SET will continue to pioneer new TV formats with differentiated, disruptive scheduling and inclusive content. "My focus is on the future. We are backing KBC with two new fiction shows. After KBC, we will have a show called Saas Bina Sasural, a story of a girl married into a family of five men, says Thakur. Adds Man Jit Singh: "We believe our programming is bringing entirely new viewers to television. We expect this audience to grow and to set us apart."
Now it is up to the viewers to vindicate his faith.
