Zoom gears up for 2016, aims to strengthen its content mix

Vice-President  and Product Head for Zoom, Sunder Venkatraman, shares the plans for content and programming for the year to come and his thoughts on the year gone by

Aanchal kohli | Mumbai | December 17, 2015

With an aim to strengthen its programming line-up, Zoom, the Bollywood channel from Times Network's bouquet, very recently launched a new show, Yaar Mera Superstar. The channel has got on board Garima Kumar to host the #UltimateBollywoodHangout that will add to the current line-up of Zoom.

In June 2015, the channel revamped itself acquiring a fresh, new look. From there on, the Content strategy on Zoom centred around 'trends' and 'youth', which are the hottest topics on social media today. The new offerings on Zoom are shorter format shows, more like the T-20 of entertainment and vary in duration from a minute-and-a-half to seven or eight minutes to longer formats of 20 minutes; there is no fixed duration. But what is certain is that the content will revolve around Bollywood fashion, gossip, style, humour, news, music, relationships and more.

Sunder Venkatraman

To get more inputs about its content, BestMediaInfo caught up with Sunder Venkatraman, Vice-President & Product Head who shared insights about the content and programming strategies, growth plans and more.

When asked how the journey had been post the revamp, Venkatraman stated that the whole journey after revamp had been really encouraging for them. “We have got amazing traction in the market. The whole thought that Shah Rukh Khan wanted to do an episode with us marks our presence and value in the market. The product Zoom has been growing really fast,” he added.

“Zoom is the only Bollywood- focused channel among the set of players in the market. Zoom is all- in- one. The channel brings viewers closer to the biggest stars through the hottest entertainment news, features, countdowns, music, trends, celebrity interviews and reviews,” he said.

Highlighting a few focus areas, he stated that Zoom's focus has always been to bridge a gap between celebrities and consumers. The aim is to increase the percentage of entertainment content in comparison with music content on the channel. There will also be a focus on getting long-format shows in the coming future.  “Our endeavour is to create and build this brand as a distinctive player among all, as this is the only channel that would give the Bollywood punch.”

Highlighting the year 2015, Venkatraman said, “The year was really exciting for us. We re-launched ourselves and became one of the most prominent channels in the market. Secondly, with the new measurement system BARC coming in, we have understood the fact that Zoom is a category in itself. The channel has a good brand recall value among its consumers.”

The channel has seen an encouraging growth in the last year. Explaining further, he added, “We have witnessed a good amount of growth last year in terms of viewership. We are already among the top 3 in all the segments and are growing at the speed of 50 per cent. On the revenue front, though it is too early to talk about as we are yet to close the quarter, but we are at the right track on those lines too.”

With such a buzzing 2015, the channel is all set for the year to come.

The key markets for the channel include six metros which have given good results, Maharashtra and is looking to expand more into smaller towns as well. “Thanks to BARC we can now measure the channel's performance in regional markets as well. We have been focusing on strengthening our footprints and presence in those markets,” he stated.

Zoom is available across 60 countries worldwide besides a heavy presence in the social media space making it the one- stop- shop for everything related to

Bollywood.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com

Info@BestMediaInfo.com