Star India is pinning its hopes on the soon to be telecast show to identify the student with highest general knowledge quotient to woo the mainline audience in southern India and other parts of the country who have remained immune to the charm of normal Hindi soaps.
To be telecast from May, the show will be conducted by quiz maestro Siddharth Basu from Star's New Delhi studios.
"Star had set a cut-off point of 85 per cent for the participants- in reality we received 18,000 applicants and the cut-off point emerged to be 90 per cent," said Deepak Segal, senior vice-president of content and communication of Star India.
The search for the child genius has got off to an interesting start with a boy from the small town of Muzaffarpur outbeating those from the metros during the selection trials.
There will also be some tinkering with select mainline programmes to bring them closer to audience, said Segal.
Findings indicated that serials and soaps that brought workplace issues in focus and highlighted the workplace household tensions tended to appeal more to mainline urban audience.
A typical viewer of such programmes would be in Mumbai or Delhi where these issues were close to life. Segal hinted some existing programmes would be modified to reflect these preferences.
In another effort to reach out to audience, Star plans to launch a classic channel which will telecast the initial capsules of popular serials and soaps normally aired on paid channels.
"Viewers who have missed out on these programmes the first time, because they were aired on paid channels, can now see them as this will be a free-to-air channel", said Segal.
For advertisers, free channels provide an opportunity to get to the rural and suburban audience. The small percentage of households which watch only free-to-air channels will also be covered, a media planner said. However, making such a channel successful was a major challenge, he cautioned.
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