NBA Pacts With Culture Machine To Bring Basketball Programming To India

Indian digital network Culture Machine has pacted with the NBA to create original programming and also deliver game highlights to young basketball fans across the nation.

Daily short-form pieces will live on platforms owned by the NBA, including its proprietary app, as well as Culture Machine’s content brands, which are among the most popular in India. They include: Being Indian (1.7 million YouTube subscribers), Put Chutney (582,000), Viva (717,000) and Blush (293,000). Content will include player profiles, on-court rivalries, NBA history, memorable fan moments, bloopers, and more. In addition to these snacky clips, Culture Machine is also working with the NBA on a long-form series about the state of basketball culture in India.

“As the popularity of the NBA continues to grow in India, we look forward to engaging both existing and new NBA fans on all platforms and wherever they are,” said NBA India’s senior director of content and media distribution, Mairu Gupta

Culture Machine was founded in 2013 by entrepreneurs Sameer Pitalwalla and Venkat Prasad. The company, which is is owned by Singapore-based The Aleph Group, operates two key divisions: Intelligence Machine (IM), which identifies successful content recipes via data collection across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and Video Machine, which creates and distributes content at scale. In addition to creating its own content brands, the company also licenses these services to advertisers, agencies, and other publishers.

The NBA is distributed in 100 countires on six continents, and creates a massive global presence on social media, including 1.4 billion likes and followers globally across all league, team, and player platforms.