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Indian Media Industry - History and Trends Today television in India has been in existence for about four decades. For the first 15 years, it spread haltingly and transmission was mainly in black and white. It came to the forefront only in the last decade. Two vital ignition points led to the rapid growth in television: the first in 1982 when colour television was introduced by Doordarshan during the Asian Games and the second ignition point was an event in the middle east, the First Gulf War of 1991. CNN started beaming the war live to Indian homes and CNN’s 24-hour availability was a novelty in the country dominated by Doordarshan. Rough and ready entrepreneurs wired up entire housing complexes and localities and started distributing the signal captured by a dish antenna. The same year saw the launch of STAR TV and in 1992 Subhash Chandra launched ZEE TV, the first general entertainment channel exclusively targeted at the Indian audience. This gave birth to the cable TV industry in the country, which boomed in the years to come and there was a huge shift of audience from the public broadcaster to the cable television channels. By 1999 of the 71 million television homes 33 million had access to cable TV. Prior to this, Indian viewers had to make do with DD’s chosen fare mostly non-commercial in nature and directed towards education and social development. Few soaps and mythological dramas kept the viewers glued to their television sets. Business Models for Star in 1992 At that time of its launch in 1992 there were two possible economic models for STAR:
Conditional access required additional investment in technology and supply chain infrastructure. STAR stayed with its free to air model for initial few years. The underlying assumption was that the top 5% of Indians would constitute a good enough target audience for all the major advertisers in the country. Its efforts were further dampened by underdeveloped rating systems in the country due to lack of diversity in programming and only one terrestrial broadcaster viz. Doordarshan. In India Television Audience Measurement was introduced in 1986 with diary system, the legacy of diaries died down finally in 1997-98 when the entire rating system was shifted to Peoplemeter. Inspite of these challenges; the FTA model used by STAR led to cities getting wired with coaxial cables by enterprising cable operators, laying the foundation stone for one of the largest cable networks in the world. This unregulated growth due to absence of any law regulating cable and satellite distribution led to monopolies of cable operators. Later even when most of the Hindi mass entertainment channels turned pay it was very difficult for the broadcasters to realize any revenue through the maze of cable operators with under-declaration becoming the norm.
During the 1990’s ad spending riding on the variety of entertainment options available and a liberalized economic environment grew by 10% per year, twice the real growth rate of India’s GDP. TV gradually came to account for a large fraction of advertising and in a country where literacy limiting the reach of print medium. By 1999 Indians were spending 71% of their time on media channels on TV where as print and radio accounting for 13% and the remaining going to cinema. In 1999 $ 500 million were spend on television compared to $ 875 million on Print. In short television was fast catching up with print as the pre-dominant advertising medium in the country. During this period, the penetration of television broadcasting has increased and India has emerged as the third-largest cable television viewing nation in the world after China and the US. Articles on Indian Media.
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