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Our Corporate Bureau
CHENNAI, OCT 2: The TNT Cartoon Network, under its `customisation for the Indian viewers' programme, has lined up Hindi speaking toons, regional language advertisements and local celebrity talk shows to promote Hollywood favourites.
The first one to take off was advertising in the regional languages, a feat made possible by the different satellites used to cover different regions in the country. North India and south India have different satellites covering them, making it easy for the channel to split up language barriers.
Hindi toons are still on the drawing board with the company planning to source dubbed versions from the country. Hindi toons are, however, not compulsory as the channel plans to, simultaneously, offer the same in English too. Cable operators will have the option of connecting the required version. According to cable operators, this facility will be available in Mumbai and Delhi by the end of the year.
Third is the Festival special, with local celebrities from media critic AnilDharker to author columnist Shobha De lining up to `talk pictures'.
The talking pictures series, which will also feature cartoonist Mario Miranda and pop singer Remo Fernandes, will run over three months as a weekend special, starting from October and continuing till December. The stars talk about their favourite Hollywood classics, punctuated with anecdotes on the picture itself.
"This is a part of TNT's commitment to customise programming to suit the viewers in India," TNT Cartoon Network manager Sharmila Bhatia said.
It is also a bid by TNT to grab a bigger share of the advertising business pie, say industry watchers. And true to their word, about 40 per cent of TNT's total south-east Asian advertising revenues come from the Indian sub-continent. Johnson & Johnson, Hindustan Lever and Colgate are some of the major advertisers on the channel. The gameplan is to pull in more advertisers to cash in on the regional as well as international positioning of the channel.
TNT & Cartoon Network is theregion's first 24-hour cartoon and movie channel. The two belong to the Turner Broadcasting System network, with 16 hours of cartoon shows and eight hours of Hollywood classics from Turner's collection of 2,500 MGM and Warner Bros titles.
Recently, Star Movies has tied up with MGM for exclusive rights of movies which were produced after 1984 along with the current year's output. The classics, however, remain exclusive to the TNT network, says Bhatia.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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