Cashmere Mafia is one of AXN’s latest offerings to go on air

If you’re hooked to television series like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation or Desperate Housewives or avidly follow international reality shows like Fear Factor or American Idol, you’re going to love this. For there’s more Hollywood fare making its way to your small screen.

By the end of the year, Turner International, which has been present in India with channels like Cartoon Network, CNN-IBN and HBO India, will launch a Hollywood movies-and-series English general entertainment channel (GEC) with sister company Warner Bros.

Turner and Warner Bros are part of Time Warner Inc. And yes, Warner Bros has not only made all those Harry Potter films but also hit serials from ER to Friends and more recently, Pushing Daisies, a dramatic comedy about the mild-mannered young man, Ned, who uses his ability to bring back the dead to life to crack murder cases. The show has just premiered on Zee Café in India incidentally.

Says Anshuman Misra, managing director, Turner International India: “We have been studying the market to increase our offerings and felt that the time was right to expand our presence in the English GEC genre.”

Sunder Aaron, country head of AXN, India, is planning on a second English entertainment channel

Meanwhile, a second English GEC may also be in the offing from AXN India. “We’re planning a second channel,” says Sunder Aaron, country head, AXN India, though he refuses to say when this will be launched. Like elsewhere in Asia, this could be AXN Beyond, its sci-fi, fantasy, horror and suspense offering.

Clearly, the action in the Rs 226-billion Indian television sector has heated up over the last year with new channel launches and with media multinationals like Walt Disney International, Turner, NBC and Viacom tying up with Indian companies.

While the multinationals are eyeing the mass Hindi entertainment pie first, their interest is spilling over to the niche English GEC segment as well. So NBC, which picked up a 26 per cent stake in NDTV Imagine, could well bring in channels like Universal in India.

Viacom, which formed a joint-venture with Network 18 called Viacom 18 to launch a Hindi GEC, had announced then that “in the future Viacom 18 will launch a suite of niche channels from the MTV networks portfolio”. Indian audiences could perhaps get to watch niche channels like Comedy Central and the male audience-targeted Spike TV eventually.

Or take Turner, which is also launching a Hindi GEC with Miditech. It is adding an English GEC to create “yet another touch-point to engage the television audience” says Misra.

The players feel the time is right because according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Ficci Frames 2008 report on the Indian entertainment and media sector, the television content industry is expected to expand from Rs 940 crore in 2007 to Rs 2,000 crore by 2012.

Anshuman Misra, Turner International India, feels that the time is right to expand into the English GEC genre

To be sure, the English GEC segment has a minuscule share of the overall television ad revenue pie. Nevertheless, it’s growing. According to Chandradeep Mitra, president, Mudra Max, the segment’s ad revenues grew 22 per cent in 2007, and viewership by 39 per cent. That’s why existing players too are ramping up their product offerings.

The growth is coming largely because of growing consumption, digitisation and as multinational brands are surging into India. “You just need to look at the growth in the economy to see that. At the end of the day, [increased] consumption drives more programming,” says Aaron.

For instance, English GECs are increasingly getting viewers from smaller towns like Ahmedabad and Chandigarh. “The proliferation of media enables viewers from these towns to keep abreast of global trends and aspirations,” says Mitra.

Neil Chakravarti, executive vice-president and business head, English channels, Zee Entertainment Enterprises, believes that the English GEC audience is bigger than what it is perceived to be. “What’s more, they are either English speakers or English aspirants, which are the people we want to bring on board,” he says.

Meanwhile, Turner plans to target “hip and modern Indian urbanites” with its new channel, which will “bring to Indian audiences the best movies, hit series and shows from one of the world’s biggest movie studios, Warner Bros,” says Misra.

Heroes is one of Star World’s most popular serials; (Above) South Asians have now emerged on mainstream American shows like The Big Bang Theory, which is showing on Zee Café in India

But the new players won’t find it easy to capture eyeballs. After all, the big three incumbents — AXN, Star World and Zee Café — have strong relationships with viewers and audiences. (There’s a fourth newer entrant in BBC Entertainment.) And they’re only deepening these further.

Take three-year-old Zee Café, which has grabbed eyeballs by bringing in the latest international shows. “What matters most to the audience is recency. Because of the saliency of the Internet, everyone knows about the latest shows,” says Chakravarti.

So Zee Café has focused on bringing in the latest shows. For instance, it has same-day delayed telecast of The Jay Leno Show and E News. Or there are shows like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which reinvents the character, Sarah Connor, from the Terminator 2: Judgement Day movie. In the film, Sarah vanquished the Terminator sent to kill her 15-year-old son and the series takes this franchise forward.

And now that South Asians have emerged on mainstream American shows this year, Chakravarti has bought all four series showing them: The Big Bang Theory, Aliens in America, Notes from the Underbelly and Unhitched. The first three are already on air as is the big new American show, Pushing Daisies. “We’ve got excellent momentum with clients and viewers. People watch shows and not channels,” says Chakravarti.

Market leader AXN, with its popular shows like CSI, House and Fear Factor, is also pushing its action and adventure plank further. It has also launched new hit series recently.

There’s Chuck, a popular new comedy drama, and Cashmere Mafia from the maker of Sex and the City. Both feature on its Elite Weekday 11pm time band. Also coming up is the third AXN Action Awards, which felicitates the action heroes of Bollywood and which showcases AXN’s localisation foray.

Star World too has been wooing audiences with big shows like Desperate Housewives and Heroes and events like The Grammy Awards. “There’s a conscious effort to bring differentiated programming that includes world-class shows and the biggest events on Star World,” says Prem Kamath, vice-president, marketing and communication, Star India.

Neil Chakravarti, business head, English channels, Zee Entertainment Enterprises, is launching the most recent international shows on Zee Café

Its new summer releases include In Case of Emergency, a comedy about former high-school friends, and Unan1mous, a new reality show. Also coming up are shows like Jake In Progress, which takes a light-hearted look about dating dilemmas from a guy’s perspective, and The IT Crowd, a comedy series.

There’s more local content coming too — remember the channel successfully localised with shows like Koffee With Karan.

In spite of all this action though, don’t expect the English GEC segment to match the Hindi GEC genre’s exponential growth, warns Aaron. That’s because of challenges like distribution, especially the high carriage fees charged by cable operators.

In future, growth can only come from digitisation but this has been slow to take off too. In fact, Mudra Max’s Mitra feels: “While the English GEC segment is growing, the new launches are likely to shrink the viewership of individual channels as the supply side is growing faster than the demand.”

With more viewing options, though, audiences sure won’t complain.