Rajesh Kamat

This article originally appeared in the MIPCOM ’09 issue.

In July 2008, India’s already crowded channel landscape welcomed a new player: Colors. A joint venture of Viacom and India’s Network18 Group, the channel set out to target viewers aged 15 to 34 with a mix of movies, dramas and reality shows. The eleventh member to join India’s lucrative general-entertainment channel space, Colors launched in third place. By its tenth week it had moved up to second place, and in its 38th week it took the top spot. Since then it’s been alternating in the number one position with Zee TV and Star Plus. “It’s been a good year one for us,” says Rajesh Kamat, the channel’s CEO—“and eventful!”

Crucial to Colors’ initial success was its slate of reality programming. “We went in with a strategy that nonfiction shows, Fear Factor and Big Brother, would get us the kind of buzz that we wanted,” says Kamat, who was tapped to launch the channel after establishing Endemol’s operations in India. “We had to get noticed and talked about, and fiction typically takes two to three months to actually become a habit [for viewers].”

At the heart of the reality strategy was adding “the Indian curry flavor” to imported ideas. “For Fear Factor: Khatron ke khiladi, we got [the Bollywood star] Akshay Kumar to host. We also went with 13 models to do the stunts. And on Bigg Boss [the Indian version of Big Brother] we went in with what we called newsmakers—a lot of them famous, a lot of them infamous—as [compared with the] international versions, which predominantly focus on common people. It gave our viewers a safety net—faces who were known, for both good and bad reasons. There are a lot of tweaks and turns you do with international formats to customize them to the local Indian palate.”

Colors’ most recent high-profile format import was FremantleMedia’s Got Talent, which ran over the summer. “Reality is something that you can really experiment with,” says Kamat on the decision to become the first broadcaster in Asia to take a chance on the format. “We’ve had singing shows, we’ve had dancing shows. India has a lot of talent—we also have acrobats, ventriloquists, magicians!”

Colors is also airing its own edition of the Argentine wrestling series 100% Lucha. According to Kamat, 100% de dhana dhan delivers a mix of reality and drama as it chronicles 13 Indian wrestlers taking on competitors from South Africa.

Kamat says that Colors has also found success with reality concepts that originated locally, such as Dancing Queen, with Indian TV and movie actresses competing against each other in a dance contest; Ek khiladi ek haseena, with cricket stars teaming with Bollywood starlets on the dance floor; and the kids’ stand-up comedy show Chhote miyan.

While Colors is open to acquiring and developing unscripted formats, Kamat concedes that “India is still predominantly a fiction market.” According to him, 75 percent to 80 percent of Colors’ viewership is for scripted shows.

The daily Hindi-language serials that have been among Colors’ biggest hits include Balika Vadhu, set in Rajasthan, and the religious-themed Jai Shri Krishna, about the childhood exploits of the Hindu god Krishna.

“It is a fragmented market today,” says Kamat on maintaining Colors’ momentum. “What used to be a peak of eight or nine ratings [points] today has become a peak of four or five. While the second season of a show does well for you, it doesn’t get talked about as much as the first season. It doesn’t mean the viewership doesn’t exist, but the buzz factor dies down. So it’s critical for any broadcaster to have [returning series] that are good from an advertiser standpoint and that bring the viewers back, but also it’s important that we keep adding new formats, new concepts to the mix, for the buzz factor.”

Looking to the future, Kamat says that the next major move for Colors, now that it is an encrypted pay-TV service in India—distributed to platforms by the Sony India and Discovery joint venture, The One Alliance—is international expansion. “The next milestone for us will be to get our international feeds in place,” he says. “We intend to launch in the U.S. and the U.K. soon.”