Colors plans to make a splash with the Indian Premier League. The general entertainment channel of Viacom18, which has inked an entertainment licence deal with IPL for three years, will launch three shows around the third season of the tournament. These include IPL Rockstar, a music competition to be held at stadiums, Khatron Ke Khiladi Season III, which will have IPL cricketers as participants, and the IPL Awards Night.
MTV, the music channel of the network, will also launch a new programme on fashion shows to be held during IPL III. All the shows are being produced by Endemol India.
Colors is reportedly in the process of locking in advertisements for these shows and is charging 15-20% higher rates compared to its other big-ticket shows. ?I think it is a great opportunity for those advertisers to join the IPL bandwagon who missed the boat with the tournament broadcaster MAX because of steep ad rates,? said a senior media planner who didn?t want to be named.
?We have spread the IPL properties throughout the year and we are calling it ?cricketainment?,? said Asvini Yardi, programming head, Colors. ?We will launch three shows under the tagline IPL Ka Tadka. We are starting with Rockstar now and towards May we will show IPL Awards Night and we will end the year with Khatron Ke Khiladi IPL special that will start sometime in September-October,? she added.
For its flagship Rockstar, the one-hour music show to be held before the matches, the channel has identified six venues, including cities like Mohali and Bangalore. It has roped in 11 singers who have already been part of reality music shows. ?While the show won?t be live for television audiences, it will be so for people sitting inside the stadium. These singers have so far sung in a closed environment in front of select audience and now they will come out in open and showcase their talent. The cricket platform and the energetic crowd is the perfect ambience for this show. And we feel this is the best way to bring cricket and Bollywood together.?
Yardi says Khatron Khiladi Season III will be tougher. ?So far audiences have seen girls doing the stunts. But this year we will have Indian and international cricketers. And like other seasons, we are trying to shoot the show in a foreign location.?
Talking about the awards night, Yardi said, ?Lalit Modi has been planning this for quite some time and it will be a grand extravaganza. He wants to do it in the Oscars style and we will pull off something spectacular.?
?IPL will be hosting a number of fashion shows this season which we will be covering. But we want to showcase it on MTV because of the right audience profile,? she added.