Chennai : The Telugu GEC Maa TV and Tamil GEC Polimer TV has a similarity in style of growth and penetrating their respective markets in a similar fashion. However, today Maa TV has utilized its potential to grow the fuller length and became a market leader in AP, whereas, Polimer TV still haven’t stepped in to innovations to think of a local content rather than increasing its dependence on Colors and Sony TV to source the content for dubbing their Hindi content in Tamil language.
Maa TV and Polimer TV are late entrants to their respective markets when the markets were already dominated by big giant media networks, giving very limited scope for their survival and growth. However, both of them invented a similar concept of creating cheaper and quality content by acquiring the dubbing rights of Hindi Serials, which were aired in channels like Colors and Sony TV which didn’t have their regional channels to exploit their Hindi concept in the form of remake or dubbing, whereby, making those channels to think of selling the dubbing rights to create an additional source of revenue for their library content.
The dubbed content despite, with a kind of cultural variation in look and feel, managed to attract the Telugu and Tamil audience due to its rich production quality, trendy jewellery and costumes by the artist which translated in to fashion update material for house wives and youth audience. The fast phase of storytelling with advance thinking in script and storyline also added advantage to the it and helped the channel to carve a niche among the family audience, that kept growing constantly to the level of helping the channels to achieve greater numbers in ratings to the extent of making profits comfortably.
Maa TV had constantly kept investing on acquiring movies satellite rights that helped the channel to attract more viewership in the weekend also and strengthened the channel’s platform constantly with block buster movies, needless to mention the cross promotion opportunity of in-house programs while airing the blockbuster movies. Whereas, Polimer TV, has a poor track record in movie acquisition, which puts the channel with a very poor ratings in the weekends. Moreover, instead of buying movies, the channel had invested its monies for the launch of Polimer news channel unlike Maa TV, which devised a plan to increase the exploitation of Movies acquired by launching Maa Movies and Maa Gold, both Movie channels with former for airing new movies and later for airing old movies.
Maa TV over a period of time built a strong team of fulltime professionals to run the organisation with dedicated people in various departments like Programming (both Fiction & Non Fiction) Marketing and sales, Distribution, Acquisition & administration etc… headed by a strong senior management team in various functions, whereas, Polimer TV still remains a One Man Show under its Managing Director Mr. P.V.Kalyanasundaram only, the channel also has a reputation of very high attrition ratio at senior management level with an average service life of less than six month. There channel doesn’t have a senior level programming team as it runs fully with dubbed content only and unlike Maa TV, which has started infusing local content in to its programming line-up with equal proposition, Polimer TV has no sign of bringing in any local content in the near future.
Maa TV has raised its bar above the competitors investing on a big ticket show like KBC format and launched “Meelo Evaru Koteeswarudu” with Actor Nagarjuna which was a roaring success whereas. Polimer TV has invested huge money on acquiring the Tamil dubbing rights of an international series “24” which was aired in Colors last year, despite the show being a moderate performer in Colors itself, Moreover, the lead character in the series “24” was played by Bollywood actor Anil Kapoor who is a little known personality among Tamil audience making the investment meaningless and the Channel is still having a great dilemma on how and when to exploit the acquired series.
While Maa TV has achieved its mark by emerging victorious in AP market in all aspects, Polimer TV need to work on many aspects to think of growing from the current level. Given the neutral distribution scenario in TN market and Polimer TV with a strong distribution network backing it up, has the potential of becoming a market leader by all means, However, the channel should start building a strong team in various departments, with delegation of decision making powers, associated with targets and responsibilities.
With the nationwide digitisation being targeted with a deadline of December 2015, the broadcasters who don’t have their regional presence in TN market like Sony TV and Viacom 18 has the possibility of looking for a M&A deals down South and Polimer TV being a single language operator, has great potential to attract such investments by converting itself in to a much better professionally driven organisation with a vision of growth.
