Sahara launches channel for dubbed content

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New Delhi, Feb 22: As the dubbed content market is getting hotter in India, the experimentation in that segment is getting bolder. First there were the Hollywood flicks like Jurassic Park and Titanic doing great business in India in their Hindi reincarnations.

Next came dubbed English movies on Hindi movie channels followed by Hindi speaking cartoon channels. The likes of Discovery, National Geographic and History Channel followed suit generating their entire content in Hindi eliminating the language barrier to increase their subscriber base.

UTV took one leap forward to launch its World Movies channel to source movies from the world over and present it in a dubbed format.

The experiment continues with Sahara's latest initiative Firangi, to be launched on February 25, which will source television content from the world over to explore an untested ground in India.

The business head of Firangi, Rajiv Chakrabarty said, "Around 40% of Indian audience watch dubbed content. Thus our market translates to about 53 million people, the average number of people who watch dubbed content in a month." Firangi also believes that Indian masses have an internalized notion “if it's dubbed, it must be a hit.”

The new channel from Sahara group has already finalized details with Cable Operators. "Talks are on with Tata Sky, Dish TV and Reliance, most likely to fructify by the day of launch."

Priced at Rs 15 per month, the channel is going to be a pay channel from day one unlike many other channels like NDTV imagine, 9x, Bindass etc which doled out the channel free for a few months before switching on to the 'pay and watch' mode.

Chakrabarty claimed to have received extremely good response from advertisers particularly from the segments of telecom, upmarket FMCG products, cars etc who are most likely to book media space on the channel. Refusing to share the details of region wise investment Chakrabarty said, "Investment depended more on the quality of programmes than the region but we have content from across the globe. Most of drama content, mini-series, movies have been sourced from Latin America, Europe and US  respectively only because these regions offer the best quality in the genres concerned."

Firangi is open to sourcing content from Africa and Australia also (the only continents from which it hasn't sourced content till now), provided it meets the channel's expectation.

The new experiment from Sahara is hoping to break even faster than other General Entertainment Channels partially because investment in a channel which has 100% bought content will be lower than channels who produce their programme, though Chakrabarty is quick to point out, "We have already invested Rs 20 crore on marketing."