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Star TV to stir up Indian American market
Thursday, 16 December 2004, 20:30 IST
NEW YORK: The arrival of three premier STAR TV channels in The US through DIRECTV is expected to heat up the competition to capture the small but economically powerful Indian American market.
DIRECTV, now owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation that also owns STAR TV, is expecting to shake up the generally sedate ethnic South Asian TV market.
"We see this as a very important step in the direction of attracting the wealthy Indian American community into the DIRECTV fold. Many of them are already subscribers to our service," Aaron McNally, DIRECTV's vice president, told IANS.
DIRECTV has brought STAR Plus, STAR One, STAR News and Vijay channels to the US market. It has now added Indian spiritual network AASTHA Broadcasting to its offering.
"We respect the fact that spirituality is integral to the very essence of the South Asian culture around the world and AASTHA will now be able to fill those social and spiritual needs for the US audience," McNally said.
Although the South Asian TV audience in the US does have a fairly diverse choice of Indian programming on Zee TV, TV Asia and Sony Entertainment Television, it is for the first time that a well known 24-hour news channel has been introduced to them in STAR News.
"We believe we offer a combination of programmes that is unbeatable," McNally said.
Asked if three STAR channels would be an overkill in a market of less than three million people, McNally said: "On the contrary we believe this market needs just the kind of exciting programming that STAR offers. The combination of STAR and DIRECTV is going to be clearly more attractive."
He said DIRECTV was also keeping the mainstream American audiences in mind for some of the programmes on STAR, especially film-based entertainment.
"We believe with the growing appeal of Bollywood, it is possible that we would attract some mainstream Americans as well," he said.
McNally said plans were afoot to introduce local content that the addressed information and entertainment needs of the Indian American disapora. "We will commission shows from content providers in order to cater to the specific tastes and issues of interest to Indian Americans," he said.
The advertisement spending on television channels catering to the Indian American population is not large enough yet to support a large number of channels.
An American marketing executive, who did not want to be identified, said: "I believe there will eventually be a shakedown among these channels. No matter how wealthy the Indian American community may be, the advertising budgets of major corporations would never be of a scale that would make it viable for so many channels to thrive."
"The ethnic Indian market in the US has not been positioned to mainstream companies in a way that they would feel compelled to advertise on TV channels or print media. There are some regular names like New York Life, Citibank, AT & T and Western Union but that number needs to grow," the executive said.
Source: IANS
Source: IANS