Bindaas

Bindaas (cool in bollywood lingo) is a newly started Indian TV channel.

Concept
Indian media is cramped with many channels. In recent time lots of new news channels have been launched. Zee news, Star, NDTV, CNN-IBN are the prominent news channel. There are several film channels as well. The prominent ones are Star Movies, HBO, SET Max. But the viewership and advertisement pie is mostly under the control of the famous general entertainment channels. The most prominent general entertainment channels of india are Star Plus, Sony TV and Zee. An important crirticism is regularly given to these general entertainment channels that they do not present the reality and show India and specially Indian women in a negative light showing them to be very traditional and dependent. While it may be true to an extent but these channels undoubtedely have ignored the growing slice of progressive, increasingy westernised women of india. In more practical terms, these channels cater to the vast indian population residing in non-metros and villages.

Consequently general entertainment channels catering to the small slice of metro viewers were not there. To fill this gap several general entertainment channels have been started in the past few years. Star One Sahara One are the examples.Bindaas is a step in the same direction.

Famous Television presenter Zarina Mehta, who is also the COO of United Television, will be the presentor of this new channel. She has been quoted as saying:

she added,

Bindaas is a new television channel started by UTV. It shows English Movies dubbed in Hindi. This channel is broadcast 24 hours in South Asia. It mostly shows very funny or bizarre movies. It is targeted at south asian youth from urban areas.

Zarina Mehta has claimed:

While Zarina Mehta may be right in her claims but the Television ratings are a controversial matter and one cannot be certain of them.Perhaps the most reliable method of judging a channels' popularity is the advertisements a channel receives.It is noteworthy that Bindaas has received only one sponsor till date. The only sponsorship is from a potato chips brand,Bingo,owned by ITC.

With the Indian television space getting increasingly cramped with more and more new channels,it remains to be seen how they will fare in the future.

Criticism
Bindaas has received its fair share of criticism. The major points of criticism is that it shows movies which are excessively high on violence and sex. A lot of criticism looks very justified.

New Turn
Even though Zarina Mehta,COO of Bindaas had claimed no daily soaps would be shown on the channel,Bindaas has started airing the very popular re-run of the X-Files.Bindaas will also be airing very soon.On 11 Feb 2008 Bindaas aired the promos of a new comedy series starring Rowan Atkinson.

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu