Colors Kannada & Colors Super occupy 46% Kannada viewership share: Ravish Kumar

Viacom18 yesterday announced its latest channel offering – Colors Kannada Cinema. The 24-hour movie channel will go live from September 24, 2018 and highlights Viacom18’s expansion within the movies broadcast category while reinforcing the network’s objective of strengthening its regional presence. 

Colors Kannada Cinema is the second movie channel from the network after Rishtey Cineplex, which was launched in the year 2016. 

Adgully spoke to Ravish Kumar, Head - Regional Entertainment, Viacom18, on the network’s plans in the movies space as well as its aggressive expansion in the growing regional broadcast entertainment space. 

Why Kannada as market for this new channel?
I think once you have more platforms, it becomes easier to acquire bigger movie titles. And also, we have critical masses in this region. 

How big is the Kannada market in terms of revenues?
Magnitude wise, it is between Rs 600 crore and Rs 700 crore from the GEC purse. 

What kind of boost you are expecting from Colors Kannada Cinema in terms of viewership and revenues?
Movies contribute 24 per cent of the viewership in the overall pie, so even if we target to get half of it, I feel it is a significant increase in the share. 

What is the percentage of local advertisers vis-à-vis national advertisers in the Kannada market?
With BARC ratings coming in, it has given an impetus to regional advertisers. I would say the ratio of national to regional advertisers would be 80:20 for the Kannada market. Local advertisers get more active during certain periods of the year and they are very specific in terms of their needs. Also, local advertisers prefer non-fiction to fiction. For the other South markets, I would say the ratio is 60 (national):40 (regional). 

Viacom18 has been doing quite well in the Kannada market for quite some time. What has been the strategy?
Our strategy is very straightforward. We don’t worry about what others are doing, but focus more on what we are doing. I think, a lot comes from a strong understanding of the viewers and of getting our content across in a way that it leads to them. So, with the kind of faces that we have, the kind of stories that we present, how we deal with them and shoot them are things that our viewers highly appreciate. I think that has been working well for us. 

For me, the ability to be very rooted and relatable on properties which have been there from so many years, is a massive achievement. We have innovated a lot. When everybody was investing in movies and non-fiction shows, we chose to do fiction like non-fiction. We were the first ones to take our stars out of the TV studios to the streets with the show ‘Sandesh’, where we started taking the stars to different cities. It started at a very grassroot level for engagement, but in due course its popularity grew tremendously and now we do a proper three-hour event and shoot it like an episode. We air it over the weekends and have got good ratings. So, now we are in the cycle where we do at least 12-13 such events in a year, where we take the known faces to different towns and let people interact with them. After us, I think Sun and Zee TV, too, have started doing such engagements. 

This reaffirms Viacom18’s leadership position in the Kannada space along with its GECs – Colors Kannada and Colors Super – which currently occupy 46 per cent viewership share in the Kannada market. 

How different is the Kannada audience compared to the other South regions?
It is tough to answer that, because we are not yet present in the Telugu market. Again, I find some themes that are common and some that are different. However, overall, the affinity for film stars and film content is higher in the Tamil markets. I can’t comment on the Telugu much because this market and the content always mystifies me. (Laughs) 

What kind of a shift you have observed in consumers’ viewing patterns in the regional space over the years?
I think, one is that the slots which were earlier considered non-prime are now prime, and there is no such differentiation between non-prime and prime. While the viewership goes up in the 8-10 pm time band, there are still some programmes apart from this time band which perform well, which was not witnessed earlier. 

How many hours of original content do you currently have on Colors Kannada?
We do at least five hours of original content. There is no original programming in the afternoon slot. 

You have adapted the mythological show ‘Shani’ from Hindi to Kannada for Colors Kannada. Any you planning to adapt more shows for the Kannada market?
We are doing ‘Kali’ in Colors Kannada as well, which is being shot at the same location as the Hindi version and is produced by Swastik Productions. We have got Kannada actors for the adapted version, but the scale, the kind of special effects and the production values are something that have never been seen in the Kannada market before. We always push ourselves to get somebody from the outside to come to the South market to set up a show, so the treatment looks better and at the same time it also helps the market to up its game.

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