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TV programme
Cultural economics of TV cloning
programme cloning: or why India
has produced multi-“millionaires”
35
Amos Owen Thomas
Maastricht School of Management, Maastricht, The Netherlands
Abstract
Purpose – Produced by a local subsidiary of a global media conglomerate, a licensed clone of
Who Wants to be a Millionaire? achieved the highest-ever ratings in India in the early 2000s,
spawning unlicensed clones among its rival channels. This paper seeks to analyse the cultural and
economic factors behind this most widely acknowledged example of television format adaptation in
India.
Design/methodology/approach – Through interviews with media-owners, programme producers,
and advertising agencies, an insider perspective was sought on why some clones had succeeded and
others had not in India’s competitive television market.
Findings – As with other forms of franchising in developing and transitional economies, the industry
rationales for adapting television programmes, global and local, prove to be a paradoxical mix of
economic pragmatism and cultural hybridity.
Practical implications – The strategy of cloning television raises complex issues of imitation
versus inspiration within the increasingly globalised media industries of emerging markets.
Originality/value – The paper examines the impetus for cloning across a variety of programme
genre in India.
Keywords Television, Franchising, Globalization, India
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
When the cluster of production ideas and techniques that comprise a programme in
one television market is used to make a similar programme, usually in another
domestic market, this is defined as format adaptation or programme cloning. While
other mechanisms of the global trade in television programming have been
subjected to extensive analysis, the domestic context and global implications of this
kind of adaptation are little understood and even less investigated. Formulated in
terms of the global television industry, economic exchange can take the form of the
licensing of finished programmes for broadcast in another territory, the practice of
international co-production, and the adaptation of television formats. These
mechanisms of exchange are major dynamics in the development and maintenance
of television services globally. Of the three, format adaptation is the most
challenging from the perspectives of business and culture. This paper will examine
the success and failures of particular adaptations of a “global” quiz programme as International Journal of Emerging
well as the impetus for cloning across a variety of programme genre in India. On a Markets
Vol. 1 No. 1, 2006
wider plane it seeks to explicate the cultural and economic challenges of pp. 35-47
franchising of service products in emergent markets within the global capitalist q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1746-8809
system. DOI 10.1108/17468800610644997
IJOEM Brief history of Indian “Millionaires” [or Background]
1,1 As far back as 1984 the success of a Mexican telenovela in promoting social and
educational themes such as family planning and women’s rights in Latin America
was replicated in India. An indigenous soap opera called Hum Log that ran into
156 episodes and enjoyed ratings of up to 90 percent in Hindi-speaking North India or
an average of 50 million viewers (Singhal and Rogers, 2001). Its success spawned
36 numerous other local soap operas created by India’s film industry co-opted by the
advertising industry because of their popularity with audiences (Khanna, 1987). With
the unprecedented growth of television channels over the 1990s there has been a boom
in the local production of soap-operas, quiz-shows, talk-shows, game-shows and the
like – cloned or otherwise. Bandhu (1992) cited Indian clones of Hollywood movies
such as The Guns of Navarone and The Sound of Music, as proof that the practice was
quite prevalent. He even alleged that Indian producers and directors attend
international film festivals in order to ascertain what can be cloned. The motivation for
cloning by Indian film directors seems an obsession with the high technology and
creativity of foreign films.
The adaptation of Who Wants to be a Millionaire as Kaun Banega Crorepati
(popularly referred to as KBC) in India was first suggested by the Hong Kong-based
head of Asia-Pacific programming for StarTV, a subsidiary of News Corporation, who
sent a video of the original programme to Bombay. Three staff from Celador UK were
seconded to India to train the local production team, and later a team of four from India
were sent to the US for further familiarisation with the concept. Still it was a local
StarTV executive who made the decision to appoint the local movie cult-hero Amitabh
Bachan as its compere. The local questions were designed by Siddharta Basu, producer
for both KBC and Mastermind (a well-established licensed Indian clone of the BBC
programme) along with the help of a team of researchers. Quiz programmes have had a
long history on Indian television, dating from the 1980s on the public broadcaster
Doordarshan (DD) and then other channels.
This first Indian “Millionaire” clone, KBC, was launched to coincide and signal the
StarPlus channel’s repositioning from a global-regional channel offering foreign
English-language programming, into a fully subregional Hindi entertainment-oriented
channel, taking on the market leaders in Indian prime-time television, namely ZeeTV
and SonyET. To that end StarTV spent US $1.75 million for production of KBC, US $1
million for its off-air promotion and US $500,000 for on-air promotions. KBC was slotted
in at 9:00 pm replacing the news in what was explained by the CEO of News Television
India as a strategy of creating “appointment television”. This is where a popular show at
the same day each day makes the viewer keep an appointment with his or her television
set, and this programme loyalty has flow-on benefits of “sticky eye-balls” to the channel
which results in higher ratings (Cable Quest, 2000). StarTV was estimated by an
advertising executive to have raised a total of Rs. 120 crore (US $3 million) in income and
gained Rs. 50 crore (US $1.3 million) in net profit (Interview Ind01.15).
Sawal Das Crore Ka (SDCK), the subsequent ZeeTV clone of Millionaire, used two
actors as comperes but they were much less known and admired actors who also
appeared ill-matched to each other. This might have been an extension of the tendency
to use multiple stars in Indian movies because of pressure from producers and
distributors to almost guarantee success thus (Vachini, 1999). Audiences perceived the
programme as an uninspiring copy whereas KBC was seen as the original, even
though many knew the latter was itself the Indian clone of a foreign program. ZeeTV TV programme
produced SDCK in-house and even though it used the director of its most successful cloning
programme (the film quiz-show Antakshari ) this game-show still failed. This
researcher’s observation of the programme was that it struggled to match the
production values and the electricity of KBC. By December that year, within months of
its launch, SBCK was taken off air, the senior management at ZeeTV was reshuffled
and the comperes were threatening the channel with legal action over their termination. 37
Meanwhile SunTV, a South Indian channel, cloned KBC and its version had been
popular possibly because it was the only one in Tamil, a southern Indian language.
Less than 3 months after its launch, the overwhelming success of KBC was already
causing considerable upheaval in the industry. SonyET advertising revenues were
down 40 percent from its earlier projection of Rs. 800 crore (US $20 million), and while
Zee was not forthcoming with its revenue data, its share price had plummeted. One
response of the rival stations was creating clones of KBC with Kerry Packer’s Channel
9 Gold began planning to launch Greed, SAB-TV negotiating another game-show
format from overseas, and Sony planning a 24-hour game-show channel. Hence
programme production and sourcing budgets were expected to rise not only for
game-shows but other programmes as well by a factor of three or four (Rao, 2000).
Regardless of the final outcome of its clones, as a licensed and quality-controlled
adaptation of a foreign programme format KBC has been responsible for raising the
expectations of viewers for higher production values in Indian programmes.
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About the author TV programme
Amos Owen Thomas is an Associate Professor of International Business at the Maastricht
School of Management, The Netherlands, where he is involved in teaching graduate students cloning
from and/or in over 30 developing and transitional economies. In an academic career spanning
16 years he has taught at five other universities in Australia, Papua New Guinea and Singapore
as well as a visiting professor at a few others. Prior to his academic career, Amos worked for
14 years for multinational corporations, governments and non-profit organisations around the
Pacific Rim. His research interests are in the political economy of international trade and 47
investment, the global/transnationalisation strategies of the media industry, inter-cultural
dimensions in management and business education, and the socio-ethical issues facing
globalising economies. Apart from a recent book entitled Imaginations and Borderless Television,
he has written about three-dozen journal articles and book chapters. He can be contacted at:
thomas@msm.nl