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Bloomberg UTV launches business reality show; reward up to Rs 5 crore
The business reality show, called The Pitch, is slated for an October 2010 release and will be hosted by actor Boman Irani
India's premiere business news channel Bloomberg UTV has unveiled its business reality show, The Pitch. The show will be a 10 episode series and is slated to go on air in October. The channel has tied up with a venture capital firm, Mumbai Angels, which will fund the winning idea.
The objective of the show is to fuel the spirit of entrepreneurship in the country in order to make financial growth more inclusive than it presently is. The main communication message promises to eliminate the financial hurdle faced by potential entrepreneurs with brilliant business ideas.
The title sponsor for the show is M3M India, a group that offers multi-dimensional reality solutions and services in the arena of realty. Currently, Bloomberg UTV is closing in on sponsorship deals; slots for non-sponsors will be thrown open in early September.
Subsequently, the Mumbai Angels, led by Sasha Mirchandani, will evaluate these 30 aspirants and in turn select 10. These 10 will eventually appear on the TV show.
Once on the show, one of these 10 participants will be eliminated in each episode, based on the judgement of the business head evaluating that particular episode. These judges will hail from various business related fields; the names on the list include Rahul Bajaj, Kishore Biyani, Naina Lal Kidwai, Karan Johar and N Damodaran.
Each week, on a fresh episode, one of these business leaders will design and assign business tasks to the participants. The tasks will be designed to challenge the aspirants on critical skills required to be a successful entrepreneur.
The Bloomberg UTV brand was repositioned two months ago and when quizzed about what this show will do for the brand position, Deepak Lamba, business head, Bloomberg UTV, answers, "The show will help us to broad base our offering as ours is a market-driven channel and not everyone who is interested in money is stock market savvy. The show will thus help us to cater to a larger audience involving crores of Indians."