Page 126 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

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“Multiplex with Unlimited Seats”

Dot-Coms and the Making of an Overseas Territory

“So tell me, you left India for work or for higher studies?” asked Saleem
Mobhani, cofounder of the highly popular and successful Bollywood web-
site indiafm.com, a division of Hungama.com and recently rebranded as
Bollywoodhungama.com. We were in a conference room in the office of
Hungama.com, one of the few media and entertainment portals in India to
have survived the dot-com crash. “Higher studies. I left in ’99,” I replied
and before I could say more, he interrupted: “If you’ve been in the U.S., you
know that it was students and expats sitting on the cutting edge of the boom,
people like you, who created several Bollywood websites during the mid-
90s. They were the leaders at the time.” I nodded and said I knew about
groups like rec.arts.movies.local.indian and the prebrowser days of Bolly-
wood fan culture on the Internet. “But we’ve come a long way since then,”
Mobhani continued, pulling his chair closer to the table and leaning in. “We
have become the most credible Bollywood property online, and even trade
people now get their information from indiafm.com. So let me tell you how
it all started.”
“The first promotion which happened on the Internet was for the film
Kaante,” he began. “It was a very interesting case where Sanjay Gupta, master
publicist that he is, shot a one-and-half minute promotional trailer, which
he put up to distributors for funding. And by that time—this was in mid-
2000—indiafm had made its presence felt in reaching out to the overseas
audience. Satellite TV was not easy to consume, it was still expensive, and the
spread was not all pervasive. So he made us a proposition—he would release
the trailer globally on indiafm.com.” As Mobhani recalled, Sanjay Gupta set
a date—June 6, 2000—for the trailer to be made public on indiafm.com and
would only be available through this one website for a week. Giving me no
opportunity to ask questions, Mobhani continued: “No TV, no print, noth-
ing. And what resulted was just amazing.” According to Mobhani, public-
ity surrounding the release of the Kaante promotional trailer worked so well
that on the very first day, 600,000 people tried to access the video, resulting
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