I’ve recently been looking into the failure of MTV Desi and why a project with such promise failed to live up to its high expectations. For those of you that are not sure what I’m talking about, MTV Desi was a music channel dedicated to Indian entertainment in the United States and was a sister channel to the much celebrated MTV franchise, which has found success and reaped rewards for its popular global reach. MTV Desi launched in July 2005 amid much anticipation, optimism and the ever present MTV charm. It was at a time when all things Indian were in fashion on both sides of the Atlantic, from the flavours of everyone’s favourite curry dishes, to the colours and sounds of everyone’s favourite Bollywood spectacle. Here in the UK, it was much the same with Bollywood movies frequently making the UK Top 10 cinema charts and popular Asian artists like Jay Sean and Raghav often finding themselves in the mainstream music charts. So the popularity of multi-culture was there and the move for MTV to introduce a South Asian spin-off was welcome news in most quarters.

An enormous screen in New York’s famous Times Square launched MTV’s salute to South Asians with flashing images of music videos from top South Asian artists. It was what all Indians in the US were waiting for and what all British Asians were anticipating, for popularity over in the States would surely have paved the way for a similar channel in the UK.

So why did it all go wrong? The answer’s simple - money. And moreover a lack of it being generated for the bigwigs at MTV who see their other channels bring in millions every year. The low number of subscribers to MTV Desi in the US was enough to put the executives off their Chicken Korma and subsequently axe the channel, after only a year on air. But recently I’ve been hearing of a possible revival so perhaps all is not lost for the channel. In my opinion, they needed to test the channel as a free channel first and see the feedback being generated by the viewers, but instead MTV Desi was a premium subscription channel in the States and so people were unwilling to fork out for the new station. And after being axed after only a year, clearly MTV weren’t willing to give the channel time to develop.

As a British Asian media enthusiast, I’m hoping that experiments such as MTV Desi don’t reciprocate in the UK, where I believe there is much promise of British Asian media being successful and permanent. Contrary to what people might think, the market isn’t too niche and there is long-term opportunity for big companies like MTV and the BBC to give backing to specified South Asian mediums. Currently the BBC Asian Network in the UK is coming under some fire from individuals in the Asian media community, however I believe that there is still a large hole to fill and that it can only be filled if the continued support is there.

I’ll be taking a closer look at the BBC Asian Network and continuing my fascination with South Asian media, it’s successes, failures and what I think we can do to develop it.

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