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Purvita Chatterjee

Mumbai , Oct. 31

AFTER re-branding Zee Café and Zee Studio, Zee Telefilms is now looking at restructuring the programming for these channels.

Elaborating on the new strategies for the channels, Mr Neil Chakravarti, Senior Vice-President, Zee Telefilms, said, "Early this year, we had re-branded these channels but now we have set parameters for restructuring the channels based on our audience analysis of what is going to appeal to our viewers."

For instance, for Zee Café, the company has decided to segment the programmes according to the type of audience watching its channels. "Viewers prefer snacking content and we have changed the style of the programmes from a holistic perspective. There will be different programmes at different times in the day which appeal to different sub-sets of viewers."

Segmenting the audience into the older loyalists and those who are just flippant viewers, Zee Café will tilt towards `Indianised' content to appeal to older viewers while at the same time have programmes to bring in the new viewers. "There will now be a good mix of Indian content to attract our loyal viewers," states Mr Chakravarti.

Recently, the channel has announced its new drama — Bombay Talking — based on Bollywood, to drive more indigenous content into its programming. Zee English was re-christened as Zee Café, which is a 24-hour English general entertainment channel launched in March 2000.

In the case of Zee Studio, the channel underwent a name change when its joint venture partner, MGM, was bought by Sony Corporation. Subsequently, Zee MGM underwent a name change to Zee Studio; and today, the 24-hour English Movie channel is open to sourcing films from a host of studios including MGM.

"Today there is a significant increase in our library and there will be new features added every month in our programming," claims Mr Chakravarti.

Trying to differentiate the choice of its movies from the rest, Zee Studio has been re-positioned as a movie channel which offers `serious quality films' and does not necessarily showcase films which have been hits at the box-office.

Explains Mr Chakravarti, "We want our films to matter to a certain segment. These are films which are not necessarily money-spinners at the box office and need not have a compelling commercial proposition." The channel intends offering films from the film festival circuit as well and use its `snob appeal' as a significant differentiator from the bouquet of films offered by our competitors. Another advantage the network feels it has is that it uses an Indian beam and is more in control to design its programme schedules.

"We have our headquarters in Mumbai and it is from here that we can decide what we want to show. The Indian beam helps in leveraging and designing the programming schedules," says Mr Chakravarti.

Besides, its lifestyle and fashion channel of Zee Trendz will also see a spurt in Indian programming.

"There will be a plethora of Indian programmes at Zee Trendz and we are also looking at alliances with lounges, bars and salons for the channel."

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