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Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood >> 95

regional-language market. This proliferation of television channels in India
was part of a larger program of economic liberalization and deregulation that
allowed multinational corporations access to various sectors of the Indian
economy. Thus, the expansion of the television industry was paralleled and
supported by an equally explosive growth of the consumer goods and adver-
tising industries. 36
These new television channels attracted audiences with a range of new
programs, but they too discovered the appeal that film-based programming
held with viewers, and thereby the potential for advertising revenues. ZEE,
Star Plus, and other channels introduced a number of innovative shows based
on film music, like Antakshari, Sa Re Ga Ma, and Videocon Flashback, weekly
countdown shows like BPL Oye and Philips Top Ten, and shows that reviewed
popular films and evaluated their box-office performance. Further, chan-
nels like MTV-India realized that they could not operate in India by offer-
ing Euro-American music-themed programming and by 1998–99 turned to
Hindi films and film music. As Cullity notes, “this music was brought in,
particularly to prime-time slots, and MTV’s music videos became 70 percent
Hindi music videos. Hindi film clips, popular song and dance numbers taken
from hit films, made for stupendous, autonomous, self-standing videos, and
this in itself effectively Indianized (and localized) MTV.” 37
While questions of hybridity and localization, which have been the focus
of both popular and scholarly accounts, are certainly critical, the important
thing to note here for the purposes of mapping links between the film and
television industries is that music channels’ turn to film content was meant
as much for the film industry as it was for expanding their audience base
beyond upper-class, English-speaking urban audiences. From the perspec-
tive of film producers and distributors, MTV-India in its early incarnation
was seen as catering to a negligible fraction of the “national” audience. In
fact, the film industry was far more concerned with the growth of the home
video market and the proliferation of cable channels that aired pirated ver-
sions of new films within days of their release. Filmmakers routinely cited
the penetration of cable television as the primary reason for the decline in
box-office revenues. During this time, television was perceived more as
38
a challenge to existing distribution arrangements than as a new promo-
tional platform. It is this perception that channels like MTV-India set out to
change. But until I met and spoke with industry professionals who had been
part of this early phase of satellite television in India, I did not fully recognize
how crucial this period had been in shaping relations between the film and
television industries. Let me elaborate by turning to my conversations with
former MTV-India executives.