MAM
Helo partners with India’s biggest entertainment show ‘Bigg Boss Season 13’
Mumbai: Reiterating its commitment to provide its community of over 50 million monthly active users access to popular, trending and engaging content, Helo has launched a strategic partnership with leading entertainment show Big Boss Hindi Season 13, hosted by Salman Khan.
As part of this partnership, Helo is offering users exciting opportunities to meet and engage with the contestants of the hit reality show. One lucky Helo user will stand a chance to meet the contestants and feature with them in one of the weekend episodes.
This partnership between Helo and Bigg Boss Hindi Season 13 comes after a series of successful stints with the regional versions of the show in Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, and Tamil. As a part of its Bigg Boss Kannada partnership, Helo launched an in-app engagement campaign, where Helo users got to interact with their favourite BBK contestants by following the trending hashtags #ಬಿಗ್ ಬಾಸ್ ಚಾಲೆಂಜ್ as well as the contestants’ personal accounts. Through the hashtag #ಬಿಗ್ ಬಾಸ್ ಚಾಲೆಂಜ್, Helo users selected tasks for the BBK contestants to perform during the show.
Helo also recently partnered with Bigg Boss Marathi for its second season as its social media partner and gave select Helo users a chance to become the ‘Caller of the Week’ and ask their favourite contestants in the Bigg Boss House quirky and fun questions of their choice.
Mahesh Shetty, Head, Network Sales, Viacom18 said, “With Bigg Boss being our flagship property, it has a huge fan base and our association with Helo will help us expand it further. Our aim has always been to make the show more engaging and entertaining for our viewers so that they also feel a part of the fun-filled journey of the inmates. Through this partnership, we hope to bring our audience closer to the Bigg Boss experience.
“We’re delighted to partner with Bigg Boss again, this time for Bigg Boss Hindi Season 13. Our partnership with Bigg Boss is in line with our mission to constantly connect our users with their favourite content, in the language that they are most comfortable with. Following our previous regional partnerships, which saw unprecedented engagement from Helo users with over 20 billion combined impressions on the app, we are looking forward to reaching greater heights when it comes to engaging our users with Bigg Boss Hindi.” said Chhandita Nambiar, Head of Entertainment, Helo.
Helo users will also get day-to-day updates on all activities at the Bigg Boss house and the show’s contestants, by following the official handle of Voot/Colors on the app. To further engage with the viewers and Helo users, official Bigg Boss fan page of the reality show’s contestants will provide all the latest news and updates from the show. This fan-generated content will be shortlisted and featured on the Bigg Buzz episode. Each week, one fan will win a hamper or referral point from Helo. The show went live on 29th September, airing from Monday to Sunday.
Digital
Content India 2026 opens with a copro pitch, a spice evangelist and a £10,000 prize for Indian storytelling
Dish TV and C21Media’s three-day summit puts seven ambitious projects before an international jury, and two walk away with serious development money
MUMBAI: India’s content industry gathered in Mumbai this March for Content India 2026, a three-day summit organised by Dish TV in partnership with C21Media, and it wasted no time making a statement. The event opened with a Copro Pitch that put seven scripted and unscripted television concepts before an international panel of judges, and by the end of it, two projects had walked away with £10,000 each in marketing prize money from C21Media to support development and international promotion.
The jury, comprising Frank Spotnitz, Fiona Campbell, Rashmi Bajpai, Bal Samra and Rachel Glaister, evaluated a shortlist that ranged from a dark Mumbai comedy-drama about mental health (Dirty Minds, created by Sundar Aaron) to a Delhi coming-of-age mystery (Djinn Patrol, by Neha Sharma and Kilian Irwin), a techno-thriller about a teenage gaming prodigy (Kanpur X Satori, by Suchita Bhatia), an investigative crime drama blending mythology and modern thriller (The Age of Kali, by Shivani Bhatija), a documentary on India’s spice heritage (The Masala Quest, hosted by Sarina Kamini), a documentary on competitive gaming (Respawn: India’s Esports Revolution, by George Mangala Thomas and Sangram Mawari), and a reality-horror competition merging gaming and immersive fear (Scary Goose, by Samar Iqbal).
The session was hosted by Mayank Shekhar.
The two winners were Djinn Patrol, backed by Miura Kite, formerly of Participant Media and known for Chinatown and Keep Sweet: Pray & Obey, with Jaya Entertainment, producers of Real Kashmir Football Club, also attached; and The Masala Quest, created and hosted by Sarina Kamini, an Indian-Australian cook, author and self-described “spice evangelist.”
The summit also unveiled the Content India Trends Report, whose findings made for bracing reading. Daoud Jackson, senior analyst at OMDIA, set the tone: “By 2030, online video in India will nearly double the revenue of traditional TV, becoming the main driver of growth.” He noted that in 2025, India produced a quarter of all YouTube videos globally, overtaking the United States, while Indians collectively spend 117 years daily on YouTube and 72 years on Instagram. Traditional subscription TV is declining as free TV and connected TV gain ground, forcing broadcasters to innovate. “AI-generated content is just 2 per cent of engagement,” Jackson added, “highlighting the dominance of high-quality human content. The key for Indian media companies is scaling while monetising effectively from day one.”
Hannah Walsh, principal analyst at Ampere Analysis, added hard numbers to the picture. India produced over 24,000 titles in January 2026 alone, with 19,000 available internationally. The country now accounts for 12 per cent of Asia-Pacific content spend, up from 8 per cent in 2021, outpacing both Japan and China. Key exporters include JioStar, Zee Entertainment, Sony India, Amazon and Netflix, delivering over 7,500 Indian-produced titles abroad each year. The top importing markets are Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, the United States and the Philippines. Scripted content dominates globally at 88 per cent, with crime dramas and children’s and family titles performing particularly strongly.
Manoj Dobhal, chief executive and executive director of Dish TV India, framed the summit’s ambition squarely. “Stories don’t need translation. They need a platform, discovery, and reach, local or global,” he said. “India produces more movies than any country, our streaming platforms compete globally, and our tech and creators win international awards. Yet fragmentation slows growth. Producers, platforms, and tech move in different lanes. We need shared spaces, collaboration, and an ecosystem where ideas, technology, and people meet. That is why we built Content India.”
The data, the pitches and the prize money all pointed to the same conclusion: India is not waiting for the world to discover its stories. It is building the infrastructure to sell them.
