Page 184 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Diasporic Entrepreneurs and Digital Media >> 171

going on to explain that BODVOD positioned itself in relation to the rheto-
ric of “corporatization” that had come to define the transformation of the
Bombay film industry into Bollywood. Industry professionals in Bombay,
for their part, were interested in the increasingly lucrative overseas territo-
ries and were more than pleased with the level of transparency in reporting
when it came to video-on-demand services. With pirate networks remaining
robust and the theatrical distribution chain just as opaque and unreliable,
BODVOD seemed to offer a way forward.
Having forged relations with the media industries in India and the United
States, BODVOD moved beyond Bollywood films and the cable business
to enter the Internet and mobile phone sectors as well. Adopting the name
“Saavn.com,” Vin Bhat and his colleagues entered into a joint venture with
Hungama Mobile, a Bombay-based media company that is one of the largest
aggregators of content for the mobile phone platform across Asia (Hungama
also owns indiafm.com). By 2007, Saavn.com had established a distribution
network that included films and film music, and more importantly an audi-
ence network that spanned the globe. In contrast to South Asia-centric tele-
vision channels, Saavn.com’s distribution network held the potential to move
Bollywood beyond a niche audience. As one of the largest aggregators of Bol-
lywood content, Saavn.com could track consumer purchases across a wide
range of media platforms, including Apple’s iTunes, Amazon.com, and a
number of mobile phone services. In turn, this meant that Saavn.com could
aggregate audience demographics for marketing and advertising companies
on a scale that no “ethnic” media company could match. As Bhat explained,
“A lot of South Asian media isn’t measurable, Nielsen doesn’t come in and
rate any South Asian television network which prevents advertisers from
entering, and there is only one newspaper, India Abroad, that is audited.”
Thus, while Durrani and his team at MTV-Desi found themselves unable
to forge links between the national scale-making projects that Indian and
American television corporations were invested in, Bhat and his colleagues at
Saavn.com succeeded by positioning themselves as brokers between Indian
and American media companies to forge a lucrative audience interested
in Bollywood films and film music. The distribution network that Saavn.
com had built in collaboration with the Bombay-based company Hungama
Mobile enabled the circulation of Bollywood content beyond the realm of
“ethnic television” and into other media networks that included prominent
players in the television, Internet, and mobile phone industries. By 2008,
Vin Bhat could declare at the SAMMA-Summit that Saavn.com had worked
toward, and in large measure succeeded in accomplishing, its declared goal
of “Bringing Bollywood to the World.”