ZEEL launches country's first interactive movie channel

Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd (ZEEL) Thursday announced the launch of '& Pictures', the country's first interactive Hindi movie channel, going on air Aug 18. Apart from showing movies, it will engage audiences through various digital platforms.

Their first step towards being interactive has been the launch of instant movie-making contest -- Never &ing Movie, which has been developed by Experience Commerce (EC), a digital agency, which went live on Aug 5.

This was launched to create a pre-launch buzz for '& Pictures', said ZEEL Marketing head Akash Chawla and added: "While people are giving their inputs, a machinery at the back-end is aggregating the content and finalizing the script."

The website was built in just five days and the users shared their inputs via Twitter and Facebook.

A step-by-step process, the contest saw people giving out names for the movie, followed by story writing and with about over 1950 live feeds on Twitter. Four scenes of the movie have already been closed.

Sandip Maiti, CEO & chief creative officer, EC, said: "By keeping movie at the core of our engagement idea and live-blogging the co-creation process in record time, we felt we would possibly deliver the most relevant experience for the audience."

He said the response to the website has been encouraging and added that the EC team delivered a staggering 30 percent engagement rate, triggering participation from more than 400 cities.

Maiti further explained that the users' experience was amplified using technology - front-end HTML5 and CSS3 targeting mobile platforms besides the desktop, built on a robust back-end infrastructure.

"This was a mobile-led design and the key thing we cracked was simplicity. The result was mindboggling -- the campaign received 40 percent traffic from mobiles and gained more than 18,000 fans and trended 'GiveMovieNamesWithAND' for well over six hours," added Maiti.

The crowd sourced movie will be released Aug 12 with a proper title.

Some of the movies that will be beamed on the channel include big ticket movies like "Chennai Express", "Besharam" and the "Zanjeer" remake.

Talking about the name of the channel, Bharat Ranga, CCCO, ZEEL, said: "The Ampersand sign in & Pictures signifies 'udaan' (flight) and 'neev' (rooted) and celebrates the duality of contemporary Indians."

He added that the channel is catering to the masses and it will be available on all DTH and cable platforms. It is staring in India first and later they will take it to foreign shores also.