MUMBAI: Viacom18’s kids cluster, Nickelodeon, is all set to launch its fifth original show named Magictoon and Prince of Magic ‘Rudra – Boom Chik Boom’, a magic comedy series. The show is produced by green gold animation and will be aired on Rishtey and Voot as well. This half an hour, break free show will telecast from 11 June 2018 between Monday to Friday at 7.25 pm.
The repeat telecast of the show, written by Niraj Vikram, will be aired during two slots - 10 am and 7 pm every Monday to Friday. Gulzaar has once again penned lyrics for the title track, which is sung by Arhaan Hussain to the high-octane music created by Simaap Sen.
Viacom18 kids cluster senior VP and GM Nina Jaipuria said that the show will be available on Tamil, Telugu and Hindi language feeds. “We could also think of other languages such as Kannada and Bengali audio feeds,” she said.
Delving more into the clusters’ pockets, the network has also plans to roll out movies for Shiva and Gattu Battu and has also started creating games for Rudra. Pointing out that that locally made shows like Pakdam Pakdai contribute 30 per cent to the viewership, Jaipuria added, “Going forward, in the next 12 months we target to offer 500 hours of local content.”
Speaking about the syndication plans, the cluster has rolled up its sleeves to syndicate local IP shows such as Shiva, Motu Patlu and Gattu Battu to countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Singapore, Nepal and Mauritius.
The channel stands just next to genre leader Disney, which has 30 per cent market share, while Nick has 28 per cent share, followed by Turner with 20 per cent, others with 12 per cent and Sun Net with 10 per cent, the company said.
Jaipuria said, “I had promised to overtake Turner at some point. With Turner at 20 per cent and Nick at 28 per cent (market share), we now have our eyes on making sure that we overtake Disney. We hope that we try and succeed in the next summer.”
However, she added that being number one is not enough and the company’s decisions have to make business sense at the end of the day.
What about ad sales? Patting her team on the back, Jaipuria said, “Despite all the (after effects of) GST and currency demonetization, we had an exciting sales team which pulled out a top line growth of 15 per cent out of nowhere.
Apart from ad sales growth, subscription revenue and the ancillary revenue streams too had increased contributing to the top line, Jaipuria said, adding, “Over three years, we had 9x growth in our profitability. We have increased our ad rates and today we are dropping (ad) spots on air as we don’t have enough inventories to play out.”
According to Jaipuria, in an effort to increase monetization of content, which was earlier one per cent and increased to three per cent, Nick is trying to go “beyond the 30 second vanilla spot that is typically what advertisers put on air.” In terms of revenues, 90 per cent of it comes from ad sales and subscriptions.
Considering Nick’s impressive growth in terms of viewership and revenues, the year 2019 is likely to have a plethora of new plans for its young audiences.
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