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Bollywood Goes Broadband: BODVOD Co-Founder Vinod Bhat Eyes South Asia’s Potential in VOD and Beyond

Written on
January 9th 2007
Author
by Kiran Aditham  |
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So how did it all fall into place?

The way we fell into all of this was back in 2002, we had gone out to India with Richard Gere and his charitable foundation. We had helped him put on a “Bollywood carnival” to raise awareness and money for HIV/AIDS. We got a lot of Bollywood celebrities involved, a lot of producers, and we got some big sponsors like Reliance, ICICI Bank and some other big names in India itself. It was modeled after something that the Elisabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation did here in New York and LA, and they’d get stars like Tom Cruise, Michael Douglas and Whoopi Goldberg to come out. So we pretty much took that model and just did it in India. While we were there, we met a lot of the talent and a lot of the producers, and we just figured that if we were going to be out there for a month, we might as well just set up some exploratory meetings.

We’ve got a very good relationship with ICICI Bank, and so their research analysts and media division had made some introductions at the corporate level. We just asked a lot of questions, and the single thing that kept coming back to us in terms of the way content is presented here, outside of India, was that it could be done better. That just validated what we’ve seen theatrically and with DVDs, and just with how distribution was done, and [we thought] that should go back into the US, and see how we could unlock those doors. So, we had partnered up with a guy named Joe Schramm, who is a veteran in the cable of industry and worked as a VP at Bravo for a while. For the last ten years, he’d been doing a lot of Hispanic marketing and programming, delivering a lot of incremental revenue to cable operators through a lot of pay-per-view soccer and boxing events, and carved out a little niche.

A lot of cable operators were asking him about Bollywood content, because they didn’t really know who to turn to in terms of helping them with this. Joe was introduced to us by one of our advisors, who happened to be EVP at Fox at the time. She put us all together, and said we had access to all this content and desires from producers to get into new markets. Joe had worked with cable operators before, and joined hands. I believe it was July of 2004 that we actually announced BODVOD as this supplier of Bollywood content for the cable industry, and I believe by September of 2004, we had our first carriage deal where we were available on Time Warner cable just in New York and New Jersey.

Then from there, we went from getting the rest of the Time Warner systems onboard to the rest of Cox onboard, and a handful of other cable operators, to today, where our movies are available in about 11 million households.


What about the branding implications/challenges with Bollywood content?

Given the type of people that consume this content, it’s a pretty desirable demographic. We’ve seen a lot of major brands express interest in the audience group, and they have expressed a little bit of displeasure with the available media outlets out there to reach that audience. You look at a lot the print publications, you look at a lot of the websites, and even some of the TV networks, and the single thing that keeps coming back is the [ads] tend to be of lower production values. They go ahead and put something up there, and because the audience is so underserved, the bar is pretty low for them to gain traction with any of their offerings. Even when it comes to the actual writing, the packaging or the presentation of these particular media properties, and so the brands that you would think would be interested in a very wealthy, educated demographic certainly dive in, but they don’t dive in headfirst.

Mercedes-Benz, Emirates Airlines, Lufthansa and some really big names are certainly advertising, but they can be a lot more aggressive. They’re definitely spending money, but not a tremendous amount. The reason that is so is that they just don’t want their brand to be put in the improper context, no matter how attractive the demographic might be. They don’t want to associate it with a media property that’s not delivering the type of context they’re necessarily looking for with their larger brand image.

So, the other issue that comes along with that is the really limited distribution. The largest-circulated print publication will probably get you in about 75,000 homes. The largest television network will probably get you in about 150,000 homes. The largest radio network will get you in about 100,000 homes or so. So even if [brands] wanted to go and make that leap, they’d have to put together a patchwork of media properties that even still, they don’t know if they’re going through a duplicate effort or not, or if they’re actually reaching the entire audience.

What we’re doing with all of the cable operators is stitching together a network across the entire North America, by which a lot of advertisers can reach the South Asian population pretty much in one shot by getting involved with the sponsorship of the entire category of Bollywood movies on-demand, or by individual titles.



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