Mumbai: English entertainment channel Zee Café is looking to reach out to a larger set of audiences by creating more unscripted format shows after launching the second seasons of “Chef vs Fridge” and “Dance With Me” shows.
“Every time a limited series, which typically runs over 13 weeks, comes to an end, we want to begin something new to keep audiences engaged,” says Zee English Cluster chief channel officer Rishi Parekh. “We know that cooking and dancing formats work and are searching for more unscripted formats that audiences are looking forward to watching and consuming.”
The first seasons of “Chef vs Fridge” and “Dance With Me” garnered 12 million reach and 23 million reach across the network, respectively. Notably, the two shows were created in ‘Hinglish’ and broadcast on sister channels including Zee Zest, Zee TV, Zee Ganga and Zee Magic as well as dubbed in Marathi and Telugu for wider reach. “English language content caters to a specific set of audiences. In order to grow that base, we’ve created a show that’s competitive and has a different format,” remarks Parekh. “Since we created the shows in ‘Hinglish’ we were able to bring more Zee channels on board and reach a larger audience rather than a specific set.”
In November last year, the channel partnered with Korean Culture Centre to bring popular K-dramas like “Boys Over Flowers,” “Descendants Of The Sun” and others to Indian TV. Parekh notes that the reception to Korean content has been fantastic with “Boys Over Flowers” initially being the top show followed by “Extraordinary You.” “India is one of the top countries in terms of K-drama consumption. We’ve managed to be top channel over the last seven weeks on Zee Café HD on the back of Korean content consumption. The audiences have expressed outright that they want to consume such kind of content and we’re working on identifying more foreign languages that would work.”
English movie channel &PriveHD had launched a property last year called ‘World Box Office’ that featured films across ten foreign languages. “The most popular languages were French and Spanish, however, audiences also enjoyed Swedish and Norwegian language films,” shares Parekh.
“The biggest learning was that more than languages people enjoyed genres like fantasy and adventure. Telling the stories in their original language helped supplement the storytelling,” he further says.
Zee English cluster is working on identifying unscripted formats and foreign languages that can continue to attract incremental audiences to the channel.
