Bangalore, March 4: Star India, the Indian arm of media mogul Rupert Murdoch's Hong Kong-based Star TV, is using the success of its blockbuster game show to spearhead its drive for greater market share in the country's crowded market."KBC was our battering Ram...and today, Star Plus is up there," said Mr Sameer Nair, head of programming at Star India, referring to the show "Kaun Banega Crorepati?," or KBC as it is popularly known.
Mr Nair said that Star Plus owed its success to its bold decision to try a new genre like game shows.
"Everybody said game shows wouldn't work in India and that prime time viewers wanted soaps and movies," he said. "We announced in March (2000) that we would launch KBC in July and even then nobody wanted to counter it."
Mr Nair said that the seven-month-old KBC, the Indian version of the hit British show "Who Wants to be a Millionaire", had tremendously boosted theviewership of Star Plus.
Star Plus has jumped to the number one spot in popularity ratings for entertainment channels, he said, displacing one-time partner Zee Telefilms Ltd's channel Zee TV.
"All the top 12 programmes at prime time are on Star Plus now," Mr Nair said.
The phenomenal success of KBC and Star Plus comes nearly a decade after Star, a unit of Mr Murdoch's media conglomerate News Corp Ltd, launched its channels in India.
Star India officials had said last year that they would spend about $10 to $12 million on promoting Star Plus alone.
That amount, industry experts said, would make a significant difference to Star in a country where a clutter of 40 to 60 channels vie for viewers who pay Rs 150 ($3.20) a month for subscription charges.
The success of KBC, anchored by superstar Amitabh Bachchan, spawned a series of clones, including one by Zee that failed to win viewers and was unceremoniously stopped. Star Plus on the other hand launched a host of new programmes and soaps on the back of KBC's success. Mr Nair said that Star Plus and Star News had been recently launched in Britain to cater to its large Indian population. "We plan to take them to the US. In September or October this year," he added.
Mr Nair said that Channel V had in January returned to being a purely music channel after trying a mix of music and youth-based programmes for nearly two years.
"It didn't work," he said. "The youth-based programmes were perhaps two or three years ahead of their time."
(Reuters)
Copyright © 2001 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
