MTV Desi To Be Launched In The US Targeting Indian Immigrants

New York Times (reg. required): MTV of the US is planning to launch three channels targeting Asian immigrants in the US. The Indian one, MTV Desi, which is expected to go on air from July, will serve as the prototype for other two proposed channels (MTV Chi for Chinese and MTV K for Koreans). MTV Desi will have bollywood videos, electronic tabla music, English-Gujarati hip-hop, documentary clips profiling desis, comic skits about South Asian-American generational conflicts, interviews with bicultural artists and desi house parties, live. MTV Desi will start on satellite nationally and then move to digital cable systems in various parts of the country.
The story says that “MTV World’s premise for these new channels was commonsensical: that young bicultural Americans have tastes different from those of youths in their ethnic homelands and therefore need, as it were, a customized MTV.”
The Asian-American population grew to 12.3 million in 2004 (or 14 million, when including Asians of mixed race) from 6.9 million in 1990, according to the Census Bureau. The three target audiences for the new MTV channels, especially Indian-Americans, are better educated and more affluent than average Americans, according to the census. The median family income of an Asian Indian in the United States was $70,708 in 1999, compared with $50,046 for all Americans; 64 percent held at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 24 percent for all American families.
But Om Malik writes that “Viacom is going about launching these channels the wrong way. They are not paying attention to the demographics. In other words, the dollars to support this channel, which is likely to have minuscule viewership, will not be there. It will cost a lot of money to get the channel nationwide rollout, especially in South Asian hotspots like New York, Houston, New Jersey, San Francisco Bay Area, parts of Florida, Chicago and Seattle. These are cities where channels on cable networks are a scarce commodity. In other words, this is going to be one costly mistake for Viacom.
Instead, they should have focused on developing the same content, but show it over broadband networks. South Asian community in the US is very Internet savvy, and have the perfect base for launching a MTV Desi (Broadband.) Broadband is the platform of the future, and it would make sense to use it to rollout niche channels.”

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