Bindass to showcase true love stories

Bindass gears up to bring true love stories, now that the channel's love-betrayal based reality show, Emotional Atyachaar has reached its fourth season. Love and heart-break is an instant connect, be it betrayal, infidelity, double-timing or a love story full of obstacles. Based on the insight that relationships are one of the most important parts of youth's lives, Bindass is coming up with its new show, Yeh Hai Aashiqui.

Although the youth general entertainment channel from Disney UTV has many love-based reality shows, this will be a show based on true love stories. To be launched on August 25 at 7 pm, the series will showcase love stories that are unique and unusual. Some such stories will feature a woman stuck in a bad marriage who falls in love with a young boy in the neighbourhood; and a young woman who falls in love with a terminally ill patient. The stories will be telecast in a dramatised format.

Shalini Sethi, director, programming, Bindass says that some of these stories might have testimonials from the people who are actually part of those stories and talk about their experiences at the end of the episode. The channel already has about 15 episodes in the pipeline and may extend it based on the popularity of the show. Crowd sourcing could be an option for the stories in the later stages of the show.

Bikram Duggal, director, marketing, Media Networks, Disney UTV suggests that the new show will take forward the channel's strategy of building shows on relationships. "After Emotional Atyachaar that deals with betrayals, Yeh Hai Aashiqui explores a very different facet of relationships. These are those love stories where people had to fight too hard to achieve the love of their lives; love stories that are not linear."

Sethi suggests that the show will equally cater to the audience beyond the channel's core TG (C&S 15-24 years). She explains, "Love stories are universal. No matter if everyone has heard about ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Heer-Ranjha’, the generations aren't bored of it. The connection is huge when it comes to love stories." Interestingly, the channel gets close to 60 per cent of its viewership from audiences out of its core TG.Yeh Hai Aashiqui will compete with shows like Gumraah (a crime-based show) on Channel V and Time-out with Imam (comedy reality) on MTV, which are aired on the same slot. While Sethi agrees that Emotional Atyachaar has become a rage now, he adds, "Even Emotional Atyachaar was a new show at some point of time. Learning is another thing that these shows give the TG. As long as you keep teaching them, they will definitely come and watch the show."