India’s Miditech tackles reality, lifestyle

Amid fears over the cuts in production budgets in India, local company Miditech is aiming to top last year’s output of 150 hours by branching into reality and lifestyle programming.

Miditech was launched by brothers Nikhil and Niret Alva in 1992. The outfit’s breakthrough show was Living on the Edge, considered to be the longest running environment-related programme in India. The popular weekly series about the critical Indian environmental issues during mid-90’s was aired on state-owned Doordarshan and News Corp’s Star Plus.

Miditech continued in this vein with an hour about the last surviving Asiatic lions in the forests of western India, Lions of Gir. The show is distributed by Granada International and has been sold into 10 territories. Other internationally productions include an hour following an international white water expedition down the Brahmaputra River distributed by Teleimages.

“As for our tie-up with these distribution companies, Miditech owns the content and our partners put up a distribution advance, which is 15-40 per cent of the production budget,” says Nikhil Alva. “Apart from this, there is also a share in revenues collected by our partner. In return, distribution partner gets rights for five to eight years. Typically, we retain the south Asian region right to ourselves.”

In the local market, Miditech’s major project for 2003 was weekly drama series about the Indian Air Force for Star Plus. “Saara Akaash was a challenge that took all of two and a half years to meet. Convincing the air force about the viability of the proposal, permissions and access, the challenges of writing a script that kept the audience entertained while maintaining the sanctity of the air force action was really tough,” says Alva.

Miditech has since moved into docusoaps and lifestyle shows such as Hospital, which follow students at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Commando!, on the Indian army on BBC World, Bum De Dum on MTV or lifestyle show Style on Star World.

“Our core competency has traditionally been non-fiction,” says Alva. “But as of now, we are working on wide spectrum of programmes from pure entertainment to serious animal behaviour films. Right from shows like Roadies, similar to Road Rules, on MTV to hardcore serious international documentary on National Geographic.”

Miditech’s expansion into Singapore has also helped to cement the company’s relationship with Nat Geo. Soon after setting up a fully-owned subsidiary in Singapore in November last year, Miditech bagged its first assignment – a one hour doc about India – from the National Geographic Channels International (NGCI) and Singapore Economic Development Board’s (SEDB) Documentary Production Fund.

Miditech has also just completed three 52-minute docs on natural history for NGCI-SEDB and expects work from NGC to increase from three hours to 12 hours by the next year. Other new shows Miditech include MTV India’s first reality adventure series Roadies (26×30′) and Star World’s lifestyle show Style and car show Top Drive Getaway.

The blot on Miditech’s otherwise productive year was the conditional access system (CAS). So far the system has only taken off in Chennai but confusion over the impact of CAS meant broadcasters were reluctant to look at new projects and considered drastic cuts to their production budgets.

Despite this temporary glitch, Alva is optimistic that demands for local content from channels such as NGC and Discovery and the digital revolution will ultimately sustain Miditech’s growth.