Call of the gods

UTV Interactive adds devotional content to its portfolio...

UTV Interactive adds devotional content to its portfolio

With Indian mythology being as popular today as it was hundreds of years ago,it was natural that even the latest technological innovations would feature content based on popular themes and deities that form a veritable of such stories. UTV Interactive,the digital arm of UTV,has added devotional content to its portfolio under the title of Divya Kathayein. Previously,the division focussed on its flagship product called Audio Cinema that featured songs and dialogues from famous movies into a 15-minute time slot over the mobile. It also tied with celebrities like John Abraham and Priyanka Chopra and launched websites for them as well as audio blogs under the header Celebrity Voice Blogs.

The idea for Divya Kathayein came from Audio Cinema where the team thought of creating a similar product that listeners would be familiar with. Lavina Tauro,Senior VP – UTV Interactive said it was time to expand the number of products it had on its menu. Voice blogs generally work on four factors called ABCD Astrology,Bollywood,Cricket and Devotional. We are quite strong on Bollywood and the next most popular thing for us was devotional because of the sheer number of people available who are interested in this medium, she said.

Story continues below this ad

Stories of various dieties,festivals and folklore tales like Ramayan will be available on the devotional platform. Divya Kathayein was launched on Diwali this year. We tested the product during Diwali where listeners were asked what was the story of the festival. We took it from there and have added new stories and deities on Divya Kathayein, Tauro said.

Deities offered in Divya Kathayein currently include Ramayan,Krishna,Shani Dev,Ganesha,Durga,Vishnu,Shiva and Sai Baba. Keeping in mind the language concerns of specific regions,the product is available in various languages like Hindi,Tamil,Telugu,Kannada,Malayalam,Oriya and Bengali. The most popular deity was Krishna across the country. In Delhi,Krishna,Durga and Sai Baba were the top three deities,while Sai Baba,Krishna and Ganesha were top ranked in Mumbai. In Kolkata,Durga,Ramayan and Sai Baba were the most popular while in Hyderabad,Shiva,Rama and Ganesh were the top deities.

Creating content based on stories that most people know of and have seen on television and other mediums makes the task of finding listeners difficult. Apart from this,problems such as regional diversity,where one deity has preference over others also makes it challenging to create and focus the correct target audience. Tauro said that the content has been broken into a storytelling format and does not discount the fact that the listener may already know a particular story. We first work our resource team to source the proper story. We make sure that the content is authentic because religion is a sensitive topic. After this,we figure on narration. It is a tedious process. To keep things interesting,we have kept the dialogues in first person and mixed it creatively so as to keep the content engaging and interesting.

Tauro is also hoping for an overlap of audiences apart from adding fresh stories to keep listeners engaged. The life cycle of a particular story is two weeks and UTV Interactive intends to add two stories and more deities to sustain interest. Tauro said that the devotional platform has already started showing its potential and added,Divya Kathayein contributes almost 15 per cent now and shows how important it is going to be for us in the future.