Fixing viewers' gaze

TELIVISION

Animal Planet now has different shows for different slices of its audience.

Even as television channels across genres appear to be in huddles working out strategies for the new year, Animal Planet (AP) has gone ahead and saddled up for the race ahead.

The channel, devoted exclusively to animals and the relationship between animals and human beings, has come up with a time-band strategy to maximize viewership.

For the first time, AP has sliced up its viewership into three broad categories: parents with young children, animal lovers, and animal junkies who watch for an adrenaline rush.

The four time bands "" Funzone, Safari, Masters of the Jungle and Unexplained, Unexplored ""- have been slotted to appeal to different sub-audiences at different times.

"We were confronted with two main challenges," says the channel's brand director Raja Balasubramanian, "one, the need to beat the increasing clutter in this genre, and second, to get viewers to remember our programmes "" what you call appointment viewership.

Following consumer feedback and our interactions with focus groups, we realised AP needed to categorise its programmes for easy viewing. So we came up with these four time bands.

Funzone, slotted at 8 pm, captures humorous aspect of animals via the popular series "The Planet's Funniest Animals" and "Amazing Animal Videos".

While Safari, up next, showcases spine-chilling experiences of the jungle, the third time band at 10 pm, The Masters of The Jungle, has international wildlife stalwarts like Steve Irvin, Jeff Corwin and Austin Stevens among others take audiences deep into the jungle with their hair-raising accounts of some of the most dangerous animals on the planet.

Unexplained, Unexplored, band No 4, is for late night wild viewing, and delves into bizarre stories of animal behaviour.

Besides these, some of the big shows planned for weekend viewing in the next six months include "The Great Savannah Race", "Dragons" (2-hour show on the concept of dragons) and "Planet Action".

Another glitch that the channel seems to have addressed in its new programme strategy is the lack of India-specific shows. So now Indian viewers can enjoy an hour-long weekly programme on Indian Safari. Unfortunately, this is the only Indian speck in the channel's vast programme schedule.

But is the channel committed to more such shows for the India feed? "Not really," says the brand director, "Frankly speaking, we don't have that kind of Indian content because we don't commission programmes locally. They are commissioned centrally as they have to suit international markets."

Moreover, viewers are not expressing a desire for more Indian content, points out Balasubramanian. And AP is doing quite well, with a claimed presence in 24 million Indian homes, giving it an edge over NatGeo, CNBC, Star World and CNBC-TV18. "We outperform all of them in nine out of 12 months in a year," he maintains.