Zoom and YouTube Join Hands – Begins a Bollywood Talent Hunt Competition Online
Zoom, the Lifestyle and entertainment channel of Times Group, has announced a tie up with YouTube to provide an online platform for its newly launched reality Bollywood talent hunt show.Â
Zoom has created a branded channel on YouTube for its bollywood based reality TV show Idea Bollywood Club. To participate, all people need to do is film their talent and upload a maximum 10 minute video to the page for Idea Bollywood Club at http://www.youtube.com/bollywoodclub on YouTube. The idea of the show itself is to provide a platform for artistes to find exposure for their talents.Â
According to Zoom, the performances will vary with every episode, to include dancing, dramatic acting, comedy, singing, even action. It will give viewers a variety of acts to look forward to, as well as differentiate the show from other single talent shows.
From YouTube’s perspective this is another shot for them to tap into the huge entertainment hungry Indian audience spread offline. Gautam Anand, Head of Content Partnerships- APAC, YouTube says that, ”India has always had a rich theatrical tradition which continues to be expressed by our community of local YouTube users. We are extremely happy to be working with ZoOm on this initiative in order to provide our users with an opportunity to showcase their talent and be discovered.”
This has been part of YouTube India’s strategy since the time they launched the India specific variant fot he highly popular online video site. They have been actively scouting for offline partnerships and have tied up with many including the Rajshri, Eros entertainment, the ministry of tourism, etc. The idea of course is to provide localised content and leverage on the offline reach of these entities to drive traffic online.Â
With regards to the Bollywood Club channel, the participants are expected to upload videos of not more than 10-minutes, accompanied by a 15-second introduction. And the entries will be open until December 31, 2008.
Zoom on the other hand has always pursued a platform agnostic strategy to try and find newer audience often depedning on the content resource. Zoom’s Sameer Pitalwalla had previously clarified in an interview to WATBlog that as long as the branding and monetization potential is not compromised they have no issues with where the content is consumed. An example of this being a tie up it had with Rediff’s iShare platform a year back to showcase Zoom’s shows. It might perhaps also help them to reach out to a base of audience they could not with their existing brand reach. A typical case is their latest tie up with Live Journal as well for the same show and more reason why they don’t just use the Zoomtv.in community for such endeavors.Â
Zoom also has its own zelf branded on channel besides Bollywood Club, at http://youtube.com/Zoomdekho which has over of 300,000 views. So I think it is safe to believe that the monetization model pursued might also run on similar lines of this channel. The zoomdekho channel and other online tie ups were earlier monitzed through pre-roll, post-roll. mid-roll and overlay advertising formats on the videos.Â
It would be interesting to note how much advertising revenues these eforts as well as those of BigFlix and Rajshri’s (our earlier reports on movie streaming going online) will generate and if they would compare at least in ratio to that of TV. And also the expectations that these guys have from these projects.Â
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS Feed OR Email Alerts!
Thanks for your information