Page 183 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

170 << Diasporic Entrepreneurs and Digital Media

television. As Naficy and others have shown, exilic and diasporic media pro-
ducers have had to work “at the intersection and in the interstices of culture
industries; transnational, national, federal, state, local, private, ethnic, com-
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mercial and non-commercial funding agencies.” In 2003, Vin Bhat and his
colleagues entered into conversations with companies that now aimed to cre-
ate a space for diasporic audiences within mainstream cable television. “It
was a surprise, yes,” Bhat continued: “Time Warner Cable was telling us that
customers were emailing call centers and calling customer service asking for
Bollywood channels. But of course, in 2004, Time Warner could not carry
those channels. Unlike Dish and DirecTV, their issue was one of space, of
capacity. So they wanted to get individual Bollywood movies that they could
put on VOD, which was a new service they had launched. And this is where
we came in.”
Vin Bhat and his team struck a deal that involved securing licensing agree-
ments from film producers in Bombay, designing a marketing campaign
for Time Warner, and developing a revenue-sharing agreement. In October
2003, Bhat and his colleagues launched BODVOD Networks in partnership
with two New York-based companies, [212]Media and Schramm Sports &
Entertainment, and began supplying Bollywood films and other South Asian
media content to cable operators and creating marketing plans for cable oper-
ators to attract South Asian audiences. Over the next few years, BODVOD
expanded to other cable carriers (Comcast and Rogers, for example) and was
able to claim a distribution base of 19 million homes across North America.
Further, having negotiated rights for global distribution, Bhat also explained
that their objective was to expand to other overseas markets as well.
Securing distribution arrangements with film producers in Bombay was
not, however, a straightforward affair. When Vin Bhat and others at BOD-
VOD approached various production companies and studios with a reve-
nue-sharing proposal, they found themselves unable to persuade anyone that
focusing on the cable television market and subsequently, online and mobile
phone platforms would be just as crucial as intervening in theatrical dis-
tribution and exhibition practices. The fact that BODVOD was primarily a
New York-based company managed by people who did not have deep ties in
the film industry did not help matters either. According to Bhat, one produc-
tion company finally agreed to a revenue-sharing agreement and this in turn
made it possible for BODVOD to raise investor capital. These funds were
used to pay minimum guarantees to the production company, an arrange-
ment that soon attracted several other producers with interests in the over-
seas market. “Once we had minimum guarantees in place and got prominent
companies like UTV and Adlabs to sign up, things got easier,” recalled Bhat,