Vijay TV charts new course

Forty four-year old Mr. Rohit Adya, the chief executive officer, of the Chennai-based Vijay Television Ltd., is busy unlearning a lot of what he learnt during the past 23 years of his career.

"The visual medium is different as compared to print", says Mr. Adya, the former general manager, Times of India. Having spent 13 long years with the Times Group and 10 years with Usha International prior to that, Mr. Adya took over the reins at Vijay TV, a couple of months back. In a short time he has proved that, he is not only a fast learner, but also a good strategist.

One of the first things he did when he came on board, was to change the channel's focus. Till December 1999, Vijay TV was touted as the Tamil channel for the youth - a sort of a Tamil MTV. But Mr. Adya decided to reposition it as the channel for the family.

"During the past couple of months we focused on both prime time and non-prime time band and started airing game and talk shows", he explains. Incidentally, it was Vijay TV that pioneered game shows on Indian television, through its Vijay Maha Lakshadipathy show, long before the advent Star TV's blockbuster show. "The game show, in which Rs 5 lakh prize is awarded daily to a family participating in the show, is the channel driver", he claims.

Having done that, he decided to bring evening infotainment for the family. Vijay TV has tied up with Discovery Channel and the Padmalaya group for this purpose. The Discovery Channel's programs will be dubbed in Tamil.

In order to fill the gap as the only Tamil channel lacking a news program, Vijay TV commissioned the Prannoy Roy-headed New Delhi Television Ltd (NDTV), to produce a daily half an hour news capsule from 15 August onwards for a fee, which Mr. Adya refused to divulge.

According to Mr. Adya, while the copyright for the news capsule will vest with NDTV, the advertisement revenue will entirely accrue to Vijay TV. With this arrangement, Vijay TV becomes the first regional language channel to get its news produced by an independent agency.

The channel has aggressively priced its news ad rates at Rs 8,000 per 10 seconds slot next only to the market leader in south India, Sun TV, which charges Rs 12,000. Interestingly the news program is aired at 8.30 p.m. just after Sun News which is at 8 p.m. "We fixed our time after doing considerable research", responds Mr. Adya to the query whether there will be viewers for the channel's news bulletin.

Interestingly, the Tamil news program is said to have a potential to earn revenue of Rs 100 crore and it is no wonder Mr. Adya wants Vijay TV to have a slice of that. "The news program is Adya's baby", says an insider.

"The new programs -- game/chat shows, serials, news -- are all aimed at establishing Vijay TV as a complete family entertainment channel. We will go digital this December", adds Mr. Adya. That aside, the company also plans to launch channels in other regional languages.

With all the new plans in place, the channel hopes to double its revenues to Rs 36 crore this fiscal. Incidentally, Vijay TV is part of the Mumbai-based UTV group and plans are afoot to merge Vijay TV with UTV Software Communications Ltd. The merger is expected to be completed before this year end.