Sony Six all set to wrestle it out!

Alternate sports seem to be the flavour of the season. Multi Screen Media (MSM)’s sports channel Sony Six has been offering a niche yet wide variety of sports, targeting young audiences. In their latest move, Sony Six and Total Non-stop Action (TNA) Wrestling have announced that two of their global wrestling sensations - Kurt Angle, , the Olympic Gold Medalist and multiple time TNA World Heavyweight Champion and Gail Kim, leading female wrestling superstar will be in India to conduct a variety of events to engage with the audiences.

Adgully caught up with Manjit Singh, CEO, MSM to know about the show and much more.

In a cricket crazy country like India, it has been a tough task to get viewers switch to alternate sports. But, Singh believes that there is a huge market for sports that goes beyond cricket. “We have spoken to the young people in India, and what we have understood is that they are looking for something more than cricket. Also, in cricket it’s not just the sport, but entertainment as well which comes from the T20 format and we have the best of the T20 format on our network (IPL on Sony Max). So are trying to cater what the young viewers want, that is alternate sports but with entertainment; and TNA Wrestling stands true to the brand essence at Sony Six.”.

Singh also talked about how India has an age old tradition of ‘Khusti’ which inspires them to bring a sport like wrestling to the channel’s offerings. Similarly, TNA has a good old competitor in the form of WWE. Speaking about how they will deal with the well set notions in the minds of their viewers thus breaking the cast built by WWE, Singh said, “The key is to build a relationship with the fans of the sports. So we are bringing out the star, touring a few cities so that people can actually see wrestling in India. Also, that fact that our deal with TNA gives us over 500 hours of programming in a year is definitely going to help us in people getting to adapt to the newer format”.

Speaking of competition, MSM’s closest competitors have revamped and refreshed their sports bouquet. How does MSM deal with this? Responding to this, Singh said, “We are looking at quality and not quantity. We have made conscious efforts to pick up the best of sporting options. We are known to exclusively broadcast some of the worlds largest and sort after international sporting properties like The Pepsi IPL, UEFA EURO 2016, Qualifiers for UEFA EURO 2016 and the European Qualifiers for FIFA World Cup 2018, The NBA and The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), The Australian Open etc. So rather than getting massive quantity on wallpaper, we are focusing on what people want and built concentrating on building sports on the whole. Our strategy is different as it involves sports and entertainment”.

Singh mentions that TNA will be cross promoted across the MSM network. “We plan to do this so that people watching our other channels will learn about TNA, since we believe that it is attractive to audiences across age groups and markets. So our channels which cater to different audiences and markets will be an integral part of promoting TNA. The other plan in place is hold tour, hold exhibition fights and also look at recruiting wrestlers from India. With TNA, we aim to work as a partnership to build brand TNA”, he said. As a part of the promotion, both Angle and Kim will tour cities like Mumbai, Delhi and Lucknow from 10th to 13th December 2013. In Delhi, the TNA star will be meeting Olympic winner Sushil Kumar as well. Angle will also be seen making a guest appearance on ‘Baal Veer’ on SAB TV.

Singh believes that with the ongoing digitisation process, they will be able to attract more eyeballs across cities and towns. “With digitization, the capacity constrains goes off, so more people will be able to get access to the sport. And as result, what happens in the cities is also followed in the smaller towns; for example, earlier a sport like soccer was only up to Mumbai, Delhi and other metro, but now we have the sport having fans like cities like Lucknow, Kanpur etc. It is the availability that facilitates the reach and popularity, and digitisation does just that”. Singh also stated that the digitization process has helped other channels from the network like Sony Pix and AXN which gives an opportunity to the channel to not only reach the markets where they were not available, but also gradually build loyal viewer base.”

Digitization get the channels to enter newer markets, which definitely call for altered programming as there is different set of viewers to cater to now. Elaborating on this, Singh said, “Certainly, not only is the market different, but also now TAM measuring the markets, skews the weightage to these smaller and newer markets. So, when we look at programming, we look at both smaller and larger towns so as to fit into the programming set, to cover the widest possible targets”.

Sharing his thoughts on the year gone by and his expectations from the coming year, Singh said, “2013 was a good year, with exception of perhaps our main channels where our fiction programming in the weekdays has been a little weak. But the other channels from the MSM network have really excelled giving a good growth to the MSM family. I think 2014 we will correct the main channels which will one of our major sources of growth. Also, apart from TNA on the Six, we are also looking at building our sports channel which becomes another growth driver for us”.