W hen you play the game of thrones, you win or you die,” goes the tagline of the latest HBO Originals, Game of Thrones (You win or you die), which premiered in India at the end of August on HBO, Time Warner’s English movie channel. The series comes to India ahead of its pan-Asia premiere. With HBO Originals, the decade-old channel wants to strengthen its positioning as being a premiere entertainment channel.
The English entertainment space is coming of age in India. From two major players (Star Movies and HBO) a decade ago, the genre now includes eight players with Pix, Movies Now, Zee Studio, WB, World Movies and MGM completing the order. The genre now commands Rs 600 crore in terms of advertising spends.
Says Shruti Bajpai, country manager, HBO South Asia, “The consumer is getting more sophisticated every day. He doesn’t want to watch only popular Hollywood movies, as was the case five years ago. There is a strong demand among viewers for original production, which is evident from our fan page on Facebook which has about half a million fans.” For the records, rival Star Movies (approximately three lakh fans, India) comes second when it comes to Facebook fan-base.
The programming ratio for English movies to Originals on HBO is 80:20. “Since the mass audience won’t be interested in the original production, our Facebook page takes care of the audience that wants to watch the originals by giving immediate updates about the upcoming shows,” says Bajpai. Last year, HBO produced ‘The Pacific’ at a budget of $200 million (Rs 940 crore), the most expensive miniseries by the channel.
According TAM Media Research, HBO is No. 2 in the English entertainment space with 0.42 per cent share in DTH (direct-to-home) homes (Star Movies is No.1 with 0.48 absolute share), which has been calculated considering week 1-33 (ending August 20) this year across five metros in the age group of 15-44 years. “We did run a two-city brand research during May and June around the acceptance of miniseries in the country. We found the Indian viewer is driven by popular action and comedy,” she adds.
The 11-episode series, Game of Thrones, is based on author George RR Martin’s best-selling A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels, and is adapted for HBO by David Benioff and DB Weiss. A new language, Dothraki, too has been introduced by David J Peterson, a language creator from the Language Creation Society.