More than a million Indians called on Friday and Saturday to sit on the hot seat of Kaun Banega Crorepati III in front of film star Shah Rukh Khan.
The number of wannabe crorepatis for KBC III is 40 per cent more than the 7,00,000 on the first day of Amitabh Bachchan-hosted KBC II.
Star TV, which will kick off the show on Star Plus some time in January, opened the phone lines for participants for a day on Friday evening. Viren Popli, vice-president (interactive), Star India, confirmed that the number of callers had crossed a million.
This time, Start TV has tried to ensure that callers do not whine over jammed lines. "We've built capacity for peak calling so that we can handle up to 30,000 calls a minute," he said.
Star TV is expecting KBC III to restore its fortunes. To ensure nothing goes wrong with the show, it has increased its back-end support hoping to get more prospective participants to call.
During KBC II, Star TV's interactive department handled 1.2 million calls an hour. For KBC III, it has ramped up the capacity by a whopping 50 per cent. "We now have our systems in place to receive 1.8-1.9 million calls an hour," Popli said.
For KBC III, Star TV has also widened its audience through its telecom partners Bharti Airtel, MTNL and BSNL. "KBC III has 30 million Bharti Airtel subscribers and 80 million combined connections of Bharat Sanchar Nigam and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam," he said.
BSNL officials said the platform created for KBC III was capable of attending 1,500 call attempts a second compared with 500 for KBC II.
Besides, fixed-line and mobile call rates have been cut considerably this time. "Both fixed-line and mobile calls will cost Rs 2.40 per pulse. It is a two-pulse call (as the question is long and takes time)," Popli said. Last year, the two-pulse call was priced at Rs 6 per pulse for mobile callers and Rs 2.50 for fixed-line users.
Thus, though there may be more traffic on the lines of these companies, the revenue from the show may still fall short from its earlier edition.
