Television in India

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jump to: navigation, search This article is about television in India. For a more general coverage of media in India see Indian media. Television in India is a huge industry and has thousands of programmes in all the states of India. The small screen has produced numerous celebrities of their own kind some even attaining national fame. TV soaps are extremely popular with housewives as well as working women. Approximately half of all Indian households own a television.[1] As of 2010, a total number of 515 channels are available in the country out of which 150 are pay channels.[2]

History
Terrestrial television in India started with the experimental telecast starting in Delhi on 15 September 1959 with a small transmitter and a makeshift studio. The regular daily transmission started in 1965 as a part of All India Radio. The television service was extended to Bombay (now Mumbai) and Amritsar in 1972. Up until 1975, only seven Indian cities had a television service and Doordarshan remained the sole provider of television in India. Television services were separated from radio in 1976. National telecasts were introduced in 1982. In the same year, colour TV was introduced in the Indian market. Indian small screen programming started off in the early 1980s. At that time there was only one national channel Doordarshan, which was government owned. The Ramayana and Mahabharata (both being Hindu mythological stories based on religious scriptures of the same names) were the first major television series produced. This serial notched up the world record in viewership numbers for a single program. By the late 1980s more and more people started to own television sets. Though there was a single channel, television programming had reached saturation. Hence the government opened up another channel which had part national programming and part regional. This channel was known as DD 2 later DD Metro. Both channels were broadcast terrestrially.

Post Liberalisation Television

The central government launched a series of economic and social reforms in 1991 under Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. Under the new policies the government allowed private and foreign broadcasters to engage in limited operations in India. This process has been pursued consistently by all subsequent federal administrations. Foreign channels like CNN, Star TV and domestic channels such as Zee TV and Sun TV started satellite broadcasts. Starting with 41 sets in 1962 and one channel, by 1991 TV in India covered more than 70 million homes giving a viewing population of more than 400 million individuals through more than 100 channels.

Cable television
As per the TAM Annual Universe Update - 2010, India now has over 134 million households (out of 223 million) with television sets, of which over 103 million have access to Cable TV

or Satellite TV, including 20 million households are DTH subscribers. In Urban India, 85% of all households have a TV and over 70% of all households have access to Satellite, Cable or DTH services. TV owning households have been growing at between 8-10%, while growth in Satellite/Cable homes exceeded 15% and DTH subscribers grew 28% over 2009. (However, some analysts place the number of households with television access at closer to 180 million since roughly a third of all rural families may watch television at a neighboring relatives home, and argue that Cable TV households are probably closer to 120 million owing to a certain percentage of informal/unregistered Cable Networks that aren't counted by mainstream surveys). It is also estimated that India now has over 500 TV channels covering all the main languages spoken in the nation. In 1992, the Indian government led by P. V. Narasimha Rao started a series of economic reforms including the liberalization of the broadcasting industry, opening it up to cable television. This led to an explosion in the Indian cable TV industry and saw the entry of many foreign players like Rupert Murdoch's Star TV Network, MTV, and others. Following the liberalization of the broadcasting industry, the Hong Kong-based Star TV Network introduced five major television channels into the Indian broadcasting space that had so far been monopolised by the Indian government-owned Doordarshan: MTV, STAR Plus, Star Movies, BBC, Prime Sports and STAR Chinese Channel. Soon after, India saw the launch of Zee TV, the first privately-owned Indian channel to broadcast over cable. A few years later CNN, Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel made their foray into India. Later, Star TV Network expanded its bouquet with the introduction of STAR World India, STAR Sports, ESPN, Channel V and STAR Gold. With the launch of the Tamil-language Sun TV (India) in 1992, South India saw the birth of its first private television channel. With a network comprising more than 20 channels in various South Indian languages, Sun TV network recently launched a DTH service and its channels are now available in several countries outside India. Following Sun TV, several television channels sprung up in the south. Among these are the Tamil-language channel The Raj Television Network and the Malayalam-language netwok Asianet Communications Limited, both launched in 1994. These three networks and their channels today take up most of the broadcasting space in South India. Throughout the 90s, along with a multitude of Hindi language channels, several regional and English language channels flourished all over India. By 2001 HBO and History Channel were the other international channels to enter India. By 19992003, other international channels such as Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, VH1, Disney and Toon Disney came into foray. Starting 2003, there has been an explosion of news channels in various languages; the most notable among them are NDTV, CNN IBN and Aaj Tak. The most recent channels/networks in the Indian broadcasting industry include UTV Movies, UTV Bindass, Zoom, Colours, 9X and 9XM.

[edit] Audience Metrics

Television Metrics in India have gone through several phases in which it fragmented, consolidated and then fragmented again.

[edit] DART

During the days of the single channel Doordarshan monopoly, DART (Doordarshan Audience Research Team) was the only metric available. This used the notebook method of recordkeeping across 33 cities across India.[3] DART continues to provide this information independent of the Private agencies. DART till this date is the only rating system that still measures audience metrics in Rural India.[4]

TAM & INTAM

In 1994, claiming a heterogeneous and fragmenting television market ORG-MARG introduced INTAM (Indian National Television Audience Measurement). Ex-officials of DD (Doordarshan) claimed that INTAM was introduced by vested commercial interests who only sought to break the monopoly of DD and that INTAM was significantly weaker in both sample size, rigour and the range of cities and regions covered.[5] In 1997, a joint industry body appointed TAM (backed by AC Nielsen[6] ) as the official recordkeeper of audience metrics.[5] Due to the differences in methodology and samples of TAM and INTAM, both provided differing results for the same programs. In 2001, a confidential list of households in Mumbai that were participating in the monitoring survey was released, calling into question the reliability of the data.[5][7][8] This subsequently led to the merger of the two measurement systems into TAM.[9] For several years after this, in spite of misgivings about the process, sample and other parameters, TAM was the defacto standard and monopoly in the audience metrics game.[10]

[edit] aMap
In 2004, a rival ratings service, funded by a slew of American NRI investors, called Audience Measurement Analytics Limited (aMap) was launched.[11][12][13] Although initially, it faced a cautious uptake from clients, the TAM monopoly was broken. aMap USP is that ratings are available as early as next day as compared to TAM's timeline of next week.[12]

[edit] Broadcast Audience Research Council

An even newer industry body called Broadcast Audience Research Council, seeks to setup an almost real-time audience metrics system. Plans for this was announced in march 2008 and work is said to be in progress.[13][14]

[edit] Conditional Access System

CAS or conditional access system, is a digital mode of transmitting TV channels through a set-top box (STB). The transmission signals are encrypted and viewers need to buy a set-top box to receive and decrypt the signal. The STB is required to watch only pay channels. The idea of CAS was mooted in 2001, due to a furore over charge hikes by channels and subsequently by cable operators. Poor reception of certain channels; arbitrary pricing and increase in prices; bundling of channels; poor service delivery by Cable Television Operators

(CTOs); monopolies in each area; lack of regulatory framework and redress avenues were some of the issues that were to be addressed by implementation of CAS It was decided by the government that CAS would be first introduced in the four metros. It has been in place in Chennai since September 2003, where until very recently it had managed to attract very few subscribers. It has been rolled out recently in the other three metros of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. As of April 2008 only 25 per cent of the people have subscribed the new technology. The rest watch only free-to-air channels. As mentioned above, the inhibiting factor from the viewer's perspective is the cost of the STB. The Indian TV regulatory authority has recommended that all Cable operators be given 5 years to change from the analogue system to the digital platform (July 2008).

[edit] Satellite television

As of 2010, over 500 TV Satellite television channels are broadcasted in India. This includes channels from the state-owned Doordarshan, News Corporation owned STAR TV, Sony owned Sony Entertainment Television, Zee TV, Sun Network and Asianet. Direct To Home service is provided by Airtel Digital Tv, BIG TV owned by Reliance, DD Direct Plus, DishTV, Sun Direct DTH, Tata Sky and Videocon D2H. DishTV was the first one to come up in Indian Market, others came only years later.

Tata Sky Dish India

These services are provided by locally built satellites from ISRO such as[15] INSAT 4CR, INSAT 4A, INSAT-2E, INSAT-3C and INSAT-3E as well as private satellites such as the Dutch-based SES, Global-owned NSS 6, Thaicom-2 and Telstar 10.

[edit] Direct to Home

DTH is defined as the reception of satellite programmes with a personal dish in an individual home. DTH does not compete with CAS.[citation needed] Cable TV and DTH are two methods of delivery of television content. CAS is integral to both the systems in delivering pay channels.

Cable TV is through cable networks and DTH is wireless, reaching direct to the consumer through a small dish and a set-top box. Although the government has ensured that free-to-air channels on cable are delivered to the consumer without a set-top box, DTH signals cannot be received without the set-top box. India currently has 7 major DTH service providers and a total of over 20 million subscriber households in 2010. DishTV(a ZEE TV subsidiary), Tata Sky, Videocon D2H , Sun Network owned ' Sun Direct DTH', Reliance Digital TV,Bharti Airtel's DTH Service 'Airtel Digital TV' and the public sector DD Direct Plus.As of 2010, India has the most competitive Directbroadcast satellite market with 7 operators vying for more than 110 million TV homes. India is set to overtake the USA as the world's largest Direct-broadcast satellite market by 2012.[16]
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DishTV Tata Sky Airtel Digital TV Sun Direct Reliance Digital TV Videocon D2H DD Direct

The rapid growth of DTH in India has propelled an exodus from cabled homes, the need to measure viewership in this space is more than ever; aMap, the overnight ratings agency, has mounted a peoplemeter panel to measure viewership and interactive engagement in DTH homes in India.[17] 18 March 2011 saw India's first self produced dolby 5.1 surround telecast on Star Plus on a show titled Maayke Se Bandhi Dor mixed by Nitin Kumar Gupta.

[edit] Internet Protocol Television (IPTV)

IPTV launched only in some cities around 2006-2007 by Mtnl/Bsnl later Expands to many urban areas and still expanding. Private Broadband provider Bharti Airtel also starts its IPTV service in Delhi,NCR region. At present (2009/2010) IPTV in India is hardly making any impact in the market. But IPTV and Online Video Services in India[18] are expected to expand. Screen Digest estimates broadband penetration of TV households to increase from 4.2 percent in 2009 to 13.4 percent in 2013.[19]