Zee TV soft-launches Bollyworld at MipTV

CANNES: Indian content - apart from Bollywood movies ? has not really travelled much overseas with total sales of TV shows globally not even crossing $20 million annually. The reason: broadcasters who own the content are loathe to sell it aggressively internationally, and prefer sitting on their hundreds of thousands of hours of TV shows.

But wait, here?s a player who‘s willing to challenge and change the status quo. Zee TV which has been quite aggressive in building its presence at TV content markets such as MipTV and Mipcom is about to take a major step by branding its syndicated content division as Zee Bollyworld. The company is making a soft launch of this intiaitive at MipTV in Cannes.

Says international business head Bharat Kumar Ranga: "No longer are we going to be in the commodity selling business, wherein we (Zee and other broadcasters which are selling content) cut each other‘s prices just to strike a deal with a potential buyer for our TV shows. Say we are quoting $200 an episode, another Indian broadcaster is more than open to discounting that price, and a third broadcaster is quite ok with dropping it even further."

Ranga says that Zee TV is quite kicked up about branding Indian TV content and building up the genre. "We chose the name Zee Bollyworld. We will be selling TV shows and movies as we wanted to own the Indian content message globally. Apart from selling our content in 18-19 languages, we will be aggregating it under the Zee Bollyworld from other sources too and syndicating it internationally," he says.

Ranga points out that the Zee group has a huge amount of business intelligence from 45 markets around the world, thanks to the number of years that it has been distributing its channels internationally and also attending international syndication markets like MipCom and MipTV. "Our syndication sales people are being re-nominclatured as syndication advisers ? they will no longer sell programming, they will advise buyers. We are looking at building strong relationships with our clients," he reveals.