Indiantelevision.com Team

(1 April 2008 1:30 pm)

MUMBAI: Sahara One Media and Entertainment Ltd (SOMEL) has appointed NDTV Media Ltd. as its exclusive advertising sales partner in India.

As part of the agreement, NDTV Media Ltd. would be responsible for selling airtime for the Sahara One's bouquet of entertainment channels including Hindi general entertainment channel Sahara One, Hindi movie channel Filmy and the newly launched Hindi world television channel Firangi.

Announcing the appointment, Sahara Entertainment Business and Aamby Valley City head Seemanto Roy said, "As part of our strategic initiatives to further strengthen Sahara One's leadership position in the industry, we have appointed NDTV Media as an exclusive advertising partner for our entertainment channel. We believe that, this arrangement will enable us to deploy our sales resources more effectively and we are sure that this partnership would augment our sales efforts."

Roy further added, "By leveraging each other's inherent strengths and optimizing returns, we hope to take our television business to the next level. This certainly should prove to be a mutually beneficial arrangement."

Commenting on the appointment NDTV Media Ltd CEO Raj Nayak said, "We are extremely glad to partner Sahara One Media and Entertainment Ltd., one of the leading companies in television entertainment. We believe that both Sahara One and Filmy are strategically poised to take a big leap forward in their respective genres and there are huge opportunities that are still untapped. Firangi, with the unique distinction of being India's first World Television Channel has tremendous potential given the success of dubbed content in India."

"The timing also perfectly coincides with NDTV Media's media aggregation plans as we foray further into aggregating various media just as we have done for the Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions (MDAS) aggregation model in the online space with MSN. This is the beginning of a lot of new initiatives in the evolution of NDTV Media's business model," added Nayak.

NDTV Media is also the exclusive sales and marketing representative for MSN in India and for MDAS and is responsible for all revenue generating efforts for the MSN offerings and for the online and mobile verticals under MDAS.

NDTV Media's current bouquet of offerings in the media space also include NDTV 24X7, NDTV India, NDTV Profit, NDTV Good Times, NDTV MetroNation and Mi Marathi.