Page 140 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Dot-Coms and the Making of an Overseas Territory >> 127

be changing now, but the fact is, NRIs were the ones who were visiting our
site the most and this holds true today also.

These perhaps ingenuous claims from dot-com industry professionals raise
the question as to why it took several years for film industry professionals to
forge ties with dot-com companies. For we must note that the emergence of
commercial Bollywood-focused websites can be traced back to 1996 when
Filmfare, one of the oldest and most reputed fanzines, was launched online. 39
Owned by the Bennett Coleman Company Ltd. (BCCL) and part of a family
of prestigious publications including the Times of India and the Economic
Times, filmfare.com was designed by a company named Pure Tech India Ltd.
and hosted on an Internet server in Vancouver, Canada. For nearly three
years, until movies.indiatimes.com was launched as a “channel” on the india-
times.com portal and established as an independent division within BCCL’s
new media initiative, Times Internet Ltd., filmfare.com remained one of
the most popular Indian webzines. The only other India-based commercial
website that competed with filmfare.com during this early phase was indi-
afm.com. Launched on August 15, 1997, indiafm.com quickly rose to promi-
nence as a one-stop portal for Bollywood content, including film and music
reviews, film music, chat sessions, and audio interviews with stars, games,
and contests, and a range of news from Bollywood updated on a daily basis.
In spite of these websites’ success in attracting “NRI eyeballs,” and the
growing interest shown by prominent film stars who participated in online
chat sessions with fans from around the world, the film industry did not
regard the Internet as an important new medium that would influence their
business in any way. Success stories revolving around the promotion of films
like Kaante (Sanjay Gupta, 2002) or Aamir Khan’s highly publicized tie-in
with indiatimes.com to promote the Oscar-nominated film Lagaan (Land
Tax, dir. Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001), made little impact. In fact, the dot-com
boom during 1999–2000 only made matters worse for companies like Indi-
afm. As Mobhani explained, “some websites set up during the boom began
offering money to film producers for content for their site and suddenly there
was a perception in the film industry that this is another revenue stream.
Instead of thinking about the Web as a medium for promotion and publicity,
the film industry began expecting us to pay them for the content they were
giving us.” During this phase, filmmakers and stars in Bollywood continued
to regard print (Bombay Times, for example) and television (STAR Plus, ZEE,
and the like) as the most important sites for marketing and promotions and
dot-com companies were burdened with the challenge of convincing the film
industry that the Internet would affect their fortunes.