After that, he feels the other two areas will start catching up. For now, budgets have been pumped up. The budget for on-ground activities has been upped by 30 per cent up over last year. As for the online division, the channel has hired about 14 people. Ashish Bhasin, president, Initiative Media, thinks the move towards a youth channel is a good one.
Youth tastes change rapidly.
The audience we cater to is very dynamic in its taste. For a long period of time, we continued with the same programming which resulted in stagnation. In the meantime, MTV got its Hindi programming in place, and began bonding with the market. Remember, the 'mainstream' programming bloc conflicts with prime-time on other channels. Competing with Zee and company is a gauntlet that MTV is not too keen on picking up.