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Life OK revamps line up for festive season

afaqs!, Mumbai and Raushni Bhagia
New Update
Life OK revamps line up for festive season

The channel will launch 'The Bachelorette India' with Mallika Sherawat on October 7. The new offerings also include 'Ek Boond Ishq' and a spin-off of 'Mahadev' titled 'Katha Mahadev Putra Bal Ganesh Ki'.

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STAR India's second rung Hindi general entertainment channel, Life OK, will soon be two years old and the channel has a robust plan to sustain viewership and maintain numbers. It has planned to launch new shows coinciding with the festive season.

Bollywood actor Mallika Sherawat has been roped in to lure the audiences with her new show, 'The Bachelorette India', a spin-off from American competitive reality dating game show The Bachelor. The show was announced a while ago with promos already running on the channel but the date of the launch has been announced now. Starting October 7, The Bachelorette India will run for five weeks and aired five days a week (the days and time-slot are not finalised yet).

The show will feature 30 participants competing with each other to be the love of Sherawat's life. The high investment show is being produced by SOL Productions. Interestingly, the earlier celebrity based show of the channel, 'Ramleela', was more expensive and had Bollywood actor Ajay Devgn as the narrator of the Dussehra-Diwali special.

Meanwhile, Sherawat's show is being compared to Imagine TV's Swayamwar, which had a similar format that culminated in the marriage of the celebrity with the winner. Life OK claims The Bachelorette India is different and will be presented in a royal way. The show is being shot in Udaipur and will run for 90 days.

The channel plans to kick-start the marketing on September 15. There will be three phases of promotional activities. In the first phase, the show will be promoted on 40 television channels outside the STAR India bouquet of channels, including music, sports, news and kids channels. In the second phase, there will be promotions on the digital medium and outdoor activations. Outdoor sites will be employed in 90 cities across the country. The channel will also run branded buses in a few towns in North India. Digital will also be integrated with the bus activation. The feed will be live on YouTube.

Along with digital, in the third phase, the channel plans to target 37 cities through radio.

Life OK will also launch three fiction properties. Starting September 9, it will air a series based on passion and love, titled 'Ek boond Ishq'. The show will be aired Monday to Friday at 8.30 pm. It will replace Savitri, which will be rescheduled.

The channel has also lined up a spin-off from its flagship property 'Mahadev', titled 'Katha Mahadev Putra Bal Ganesh Ki'. The show aims to get kids on to the channel. The 16-episode series will be launched on September 14 and be aired every Saturday and Sunday at 7 pm. Depending on the response from the audience, the channel could consider extending the number of episodes.

Ajit Thakur, general manager, Life OK, says, "Life OK was launched with a view that it will be very different and there will be no saas-bahu drama unless we are sending out any social message through the show. In non-fiction also we have never had a singing or dancing reality show and have maintained uniqueness in our programme offerings."

Braving the storm of digitisation, the channel has grown in viewership in 2013. As per TAM data (HSM, C&S, 4+) shared by the channel, in January 2013, Life OK grossed around 110 GRPs that has increased to 150 GRPs now.

Although Life OK is considered a second rung GEC compared to Star Plus, Thakur states that the channel will always compete with Star Plus. According to the channel's consumer research data, Mahadev, Savdhaan India and Shapath are the top three shows running on the channel.

Star India Star Plus Life OK Ajit Thakur
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