Discovery‘s mission is clear. Build up the audience base by offering content in regional languages. With this objective in mind the channel on Wednesday announced the launch of a Tamil-language broadcast fuelled by the encouraging response to its 24-hour English and Hindi language feeds.

An official release informs that the channels decision to diversify into Tamil was based on a study that showed that Discovery?s viewers who converse in neither English nor Hindi want to watch and understand programmes in their mother tongue. This prompted the channel to move into the region-specific ?mode? and ?speak the viewer?s language?. The release states that the channel will maintain the relevance and quality of the content through the use of colloquial and ?viewer-friendly? terms and phrases.
For starters the Tamil broadcast will air in the ?Family Time? timeband from 8 to 10 pm, Monday to Friday, with repeat telecast from 10 am to 12 noon. The channels long term goal is to gradually make the broadcast 24 hours a day. Tamil programmes will concentrate on fact based entertainment programnmes which are based on theme nights. They are History on Mondays, Science on Tuesdays, Forensics on Wednesdays, Health on Thursdays and Special Premieres on Friday.

Speaking on the latest initiative MD Discovery Communications India Deepak Shourie said, ?Discovery in Hindi achieved an enormous jump in viewership for the channel in regions where Hindi is predominant. With Discovery in Tamil, we are confident of attracting a large Tamil-speaking viewer base to the channel and expanding viewership in South India. We decided to begin the Tamil-language broadcast as Tamil Nadu comprises the largest number of cable and satellite television channel viewers in South India. After Tamil, we plan to diversify into more regional languages in South India."

Reports indicate that the Tamil channel will be followed by a Telugu one. Judging by viewers response the channel will consider launching feeds in Malayalam and Kannada.

The release informs that as of now the Discovery Channel is available in 33 languages worldwide. The Tamil-language broadcast reflects Discovery Channel?s international strategy to be accessible to the largest number of people and to showcase high-quality global content in region-specific languages.

Launched in India in 1995, Discovery is today the sixth most-widely distributed channel in India and reaches over 21 million households.

Sumangali Cable Vision (SCV), the Sun Network-owned leading cable distribution company in Tamil Nadu, is expanding its base to add the city of Hyderabad within its servicing area.
"From September, we will start operation in Hyderabad too," SCV‘s chief executive Dayanidhi Maran told indiantelevision.com on the sidelines of a seminar on CAS organised by CETMA in New Delhi today.

Pointing out that at present the company has cable services in six cities in Tamil Nadu, Maran, however, said there are no plans to start operations in North India.

"We have enough on our hands and don‘t want to go to areas where there are already established players," he said. On its cable networks across Tamil Nadu, apart from cable TV, SCV also provides its subscribers net-over-cable for which rates are different depending on the usage and various packages.

Maran, however, was not forthcoming how and from where such huge amounts of money would be raised by MSOs and cable operators. "It would be a huge investment is all that I can say," Maran said.

The courting game is on in right earnest in the distribution arena. And it is on the Zee Turner and SET Discovery distribution platforms where the action is.
A Zee Turner executive confirmed to indiantelevision.com today that talks were on with CNBC India and MTV India to bring them aboard. He was speaking on the sidelines of a seminar on conditional access systems (CAS) organised by the Consumer Electronics & TV Manufacturers‘ Association (CETMA) in the capital.
Asked for his response, Shantonu Aditya, head of Sony Entertainment TV (SET) Discovery Pvt Ltd, said negotiations with CNBC India were continuing.

The buzz in the industry is that production company TV18, which runs CNBC India, and has already taken over advertising generating activities from Sony, is slated to shift to Zee Turner when the contract with Sony comes up for renewal in March 2003.

Sony meanwhile, is on a hunt of its own and looking at adding more channels to its bouquet. "We are looking at channels in the space of music and news to be part of the bouquet which we distribute," Aditya said.

Aditya, was however, not forthcoming on the names of channels being considered to be part of the bouquet. "There are very few choices now in the space of music and news," he said.

Asked specifically whether the music channel was MTV, Aditya took refuge in Murphy‘s Law (when you cannot convince anybody, confuse him) and said, "well there is B4U Music too."

Asked for his reaction to the news that both Zee and Sony were interested in his music channel, Alex Kuruvilla, managing director, MTV India, said: "As things stand, we are not about to join any platform. However, if anyone were to put a compelling proposition in front of us, we would definitely evaluate it very seriously."

On the news channel front Aditya said the company was open to distributing an existing news channel or even a proposed one. "We are open to both options. But we do not want to invest in a news channel at this moment and own it," he clarified.

Media circles have been abuzz with rumours that NDTV, proposing an independent venture in news and current affairs in Hindi and English post March 2003, has been been talking to Sony for distribution of its channel(s).

Asked about NDTV‘s proposed news channel and a possible tie-up with SET Discovery, Aditya refused to comment.

Do the amendments being sought in the Cable TV (Networks) regulation Act, 1995 address the issue of subscriber management system? Will there be a penalty for under-declaration of subscriber base by cable operators? Who will invest in the upgradation of head-ends when conditional access is implemented? What should be the business model in a post-CAS era? What should be the ideal technical specifications - open architecture or proprietary technology?

There were more questions and concerns than answers and solutions. That, in a nutshell, was the outcome of a seminar on conditional access systems (CAS) and pay TV channels that had been organised by the Consumer Electronics & TV Manufacturers‘ Association (CETMA) in Delhi today.
After the seminar, a chief executive of a joint venture cable distribution company admitted in private that "too may issues and concerns were voiced with almost no solutions offered."
If Shantanu Aditya, head of Sony Entertainment TV Discovery Pvt Ltd, a cable distribution company, felt that the amendments which have been proposed in the Cable TV (Networks) regulation Act, 1995, would not help India leapfrog where technology is concerned and also does not address the issue of under-reporting by cable operators, Vikki Choudhry, an independent cable operator in Delhi was of the opinion that the broadcasters, most of the time, do not take into account the problems of cable operators which include financial ones too. "In such a scenario, CAS is a good thing for the whole industry as it will bring about some transparency," he added.

However, the three major concerns, which CETMA will apprise the government of after collating facts from the seminar, amongst others, are the following:

1. The cost factor: higher duties on set top boxes (STBs) which at present total up to about 58.6 per cent, must be reduced drastically. According to Rajeev Karwal, senior vice-president (consumer electronics) of Philips India Ltd, "If the government really wishes to popularise CAS through STBs, then the various duties on STBs need to be reduced."

2. Safeguard against unauthorised re-distribution of pay channels after CAS is implemented. Explained Sanjiv Kainth, general manager, digital products, Thomson Multimedia India Pvt. Ltd: "The government has to ensure that after CAS is implemented, nobody illegally redistributes pay channels. This is very important as it will defeat the whole purpose of CAS."

3. The analog vs digital STB issue: With confusion prevailing in the Indian market whether India should go in for anlaog or digital STBs, Thomson‘s Kainth said that various lobbies be damned as market forces, based on economic factors of the region serviced by cable operators will decide whether it will be analog or digital STBs. "As I see it, in all probability, it will be a mix of both with cable operators servicing more affluent areas having the option to go in for digital STBs," he added. But differing with Kainth on this issue was Aditya who felt that analog STBs would be a "step backward."

K. Jayaraman, managing director of Hathaway & Datacom Cable, felt that CAS may address the issue of piracy which results in loss of revenue for everybody, but added that some pilot projects undertaken by his company has shown that digital STBs don‘t seem to work very well in India.

But it was Thomson‘s Kainth, airing CETMA‘s overall view, who came out with a splendid presentation on CAS and pay channels which covered the whole gamut of issues from investments to the business models to the technical specifications.

According to Kainth, investment between Rs 25 million to Rs 100 million would be needed in a headend that is distributing 40-odd digital channels and "ultimately it would be the cable operator who owns the subscriber and the subscribers themselves who will have to bear a major share of the investment pie." A point of view also voiced by Dayanidhi Maran, chief executive of the Sun-owned Sumangali Cable Vision cable distribution company.

Sunil Khanna, chief executive of Zee Turner Pvt. Ltd, referred to the idea of "headend in the sky" which will drastically reduce the cost of physical implementation of CAS throughout the country in various phases.

Head in the sky concept involves forming a platform of broadcasters who uplink from a common place where all the signals are encrypted after the various channel signals are passed through a box and then uplinked again in that format. The cable operator then downlinks the encrypted bunch of signals, mixes the free to air channels and re-distributes to consumers according to their needs.

But, countered, a senior executive from a hardware manufacturing firm, headend-in-the-sky concept sounds very good theoretically, but will remain a fantasy as in this case the broadcasters have to decide first to come together which looks a remote possibility.

Then, of course, consumer activist and columnist Pushpa Girimaji, presenting the consumers‘ viewpoint said that CAS is fine but the way everything has been framed it seems to limit the consumer‘s options rather make it flexible.

"The Bill on CAS takes away the people‘s right of choice and gives the power to the government to decide what they should see. It curtails consumers choice and nobody should decide how many channels people should see (or not see)," Girimaji said while referring to the CAS and the basic tier of free to air channels being proposed by the government.

For the harried small cable op in India, flustered by the myriad possibilities of conditional access and Internet over cable, help is at hand.
Shamim Shaikh, managing director of the most proactive cable TV network coalitions in India - the Seven Star Cable Network which controls around 20 per cent of Mumbai‘s cable TV viewing populace, is launching a consultancy for cable ops. The consultancy will help the cable op choose between the right hardware for his system from the bewildering array available currently.
"While vendors are merely interested in pushing their wares, mostly imported, cable ops are often not clear about their requirements and end up investing huge amounts in outdated or irrelevant technology," he says. Seven Star - an agglomeration of nine once-independent cable TV systems - was the first Indian CATV networks to install an addressable system in subscribers‘ homes way back in 1999. Shaikh, who consequently has a wealth of experience to bank on, now plans to disburse his knowledge with the vast scattered community of cable ops in the country.

"I don‘t want the cable ops to repeat the mistakes we made", says Shaikh, pointing out that most small time cable ops invest huge amounts from their own pockets in putting up systems like Internet over cable and then run the risk of incompatibility. Hardware like switches, amplifiers, even optic fibre needs to be such that it is upgradable and compatible to the Indian conditions, says Shaikh. The novice cable op often trusts the vendors and ends up with the wrong product, he says. Shaikh himself had burnt his fingers with a CMTS system in which Seven Star invested nearly Rs 5 million some years ago. Several cable ops also stand the risk of being stuck with set top boxes which may not work efficiently in Indian conditions as well as with ISPs who may not be ideal for their networks, he says.

Shaikh, who already has clients in Dar-es-Salam, Tanzania, and Sri Lanka, now plans to open an office in Mumbai to cater to domestic cable ops.