Colors strategy to fight weekend battle sans movie

Indiantelevision.com Team

(24 February 2012 8:12 pm)

MUMBAI: Colors, the flagship Hindi general entertainment channel (GEC) from the Viacom18 stable, which is lagging behind Sony Entertainment Television (Set) in the numbers battle, is now strengthening its weekend programming to add more eyeballs and attract more viewers to the channel.

The channel is launching two new shows on 25 February, and will be airing special 'mahaepisodes' of fiction shows during weekend primetime.

The channel, which earlier used to air multiple movies, sometimes with one-break, in the weekends, has decided to curtail its dependency on the films.

And with Viacom18 deferring its plans of launching a Hindi movie channel, Colors offloaded many of its major titles in a bulk deal to Star Network.

"Viacom18 was on a movie acquiring spree, which was justified given the plans for a Hindi movie channel. However, when Star and Zee also entered in the fray aggressively, the business model went kaput. So, it was obvious for the company to defer the launch plans and to sell some of the movies to other players. What it also means is, that Colors will not have as many titles in the library to fill weekends," a media observer said.

Colors is launching two non-fiction properties on 25 February. The first is the third season of its home-grown kids' comic reality show Chote Miyan while the second one is Zindagi Ki Haqeeqat Se Aamna Saamna.

Chote Miyan Chapter 3, as it is named for this season, will air every Saturday and Sunday at the 7 pm slot while Aamna Saamna takes the 10 pm slot.

Aamna Saamna will feature real life stories that harass the average man: issues like parents dealing with a child's suicide, sibling squabbling over property, emotional torture faced by housewives dealing with greedy in-laws.