Tips On Taking Television Content Online From MTV India

Entertainment business is evolving from its traditional form but the next big challenge is to bring an interactivity element to content in keeping with how social media wave is changing the content is consumed by people. Aditya Swamy, EVP and business head for MTV India speaking at digital and mobile marketing conference Click Asia Summit 2012, shared some insights into how the television vs online media can be bridged. Techcircle brings in few pointers from the session.

Previously a micro site was considered enough for having a digital presence, but now it's nowhere near enough, according to Swamy. Today mediums like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, among others cannot be neglected and instead have to be effectively exploited. He talked about the channel's most popular show in India a youth targeted reality show called 'MTV Roadies' and mentioned how its Facebook page has over 3.5 million fans and gets more than 1 million unique visitors on a daily basis.

Swamy added that it is also not enough to get a large audience. The key is to keep them interested in such a manner that they come back time and time again. Also, the audience has to be pampered and treated like VVIP's to keep them happy.

Additionally, since every medium is different in nature, content should be created keeping the medium in mind. Swamy mentioned that initially the broadcaster made the mistake of cutting, copying and pasting content from the TV to the online medium and have since learnt from its mistakes. They now offer Webisodes and live chat online and also offer audio blogs and voice chat on mobile phones.

"Every visit should be interesting for the visitor in the sense that it should offer him/her with something unique every time they visit the page. For the 20 odd episodes of our show, we will have more than 200 Webisodes (exclusive content that can only be viewed on the website and not on TV)," said Swamy.

Swamy also said that innovation is important and activity on the social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter should be 24x7x365 days. He concluded by saying that the forums on the sites should not be moderated and instead should be open.

"We should learn to take the bad with the good," said Swamy.