'We would love to bring Spanish saas-bahu dramas to India'

Flecka Picardo

Flecka Picardo, Reality TV's London-based marketing manager for India and the Asia Pacific was visiting Delhi to take stock of the channel's operations in the country. She was candid about the channel's teething troubles (read low penetration and scant awareness) in India.

However, she insisted that Zone Vision, the European broadcasting company that runs the channel, is serious about the Asia market, especially, India. Picardo, who has worked with Sony Entertainment Television and CNBC in India and Asia Television Network in the UK spoke to Business Standard on a range of issues. Excerpts:

Nearly 21 months after its launch, Reality TV is not seen in most parts of the country.

Well, our distribution partner Zee-Turner knows best. Yes, the numbers haven't grown very much but they haven't dropped either. Reality TV reaches about 15 million cable and satellite households. Now we are floating incentive schemes for the cable operators.

Isn't the brand awareness of Reality TV also limited?

We are going to promote the channel in a big way. In the coming week we're launching our ad campaign in cinema theatres in three cities.We're also advertising on the local cable channels as well as cable magazines. Next year, we have plans to use the print media.

How do you plan to attract viewers?

Ideally, we would love to have an India-specific feed as it's a big market for us but I am not sure when exactly will that happen. So for the time being our head of programming is making serious efforts to create programmes for India. We've already created fillers on India in Hindi.

We would love to create Indian versions of our popular interactive shows such as 'Match-maker' and 'Cheaters' but we're restricted by the lack of separate feed for India. For the same reason, advertising may also be restricted. Since we are a pan-Asia channel, not many Indian advertisers want to be seen, say, in Malaysia.

Will some of the other channels in the Zone Vision bouquet come to India?

Our preimum film channel Europa Europa offers the best in European cinema but Indians, used to Zee Cinema and Star Gold, may not really lap up Italian and French films.

But we would love to bring our telly novellas here. These are the "saas-bahu" soaps in Spanish available on our channel Romantica. These could be brought in with sub-titles and may be as a band on another channel to begin with.