While other channels are still biting the family soap bait, Sahara TV has decided to tread the untrodden path with a new series on the theme of sati, to be slotted on the 8:30 pm prime time band. 
A daily, Har Mod Par will be aired Mondays to Fridays, with repeats every day at 1:30 pm. The show could well play a crucial role in the channel‘s programming, which is scheduled for a total revamp around March 2002. Says Tandon,"It will not be a social documentary, but an eye opener in an entertaining way." According to one of the directors of the show, Jitendra Kumar, the team screened more than 400 young girls and even postponed the shoot for more than five months till they could find the right face for the lead role. Tandon says she has two directors, Kumar and Rahul Mewawala for the show, as a daily series involves a lot of post production and shooting work. The serial has currently been sanctioned a run of 260 episodes. The shooting for Har Mod Par is on at Charkop in suburban Mumbai, where the small town ambience has been recreated to accuracy. 
While Tandon is tight lipped about the costs involved, she maintains that it is a medium budget show. Quizzed as to why Sahara picked this concept for a show, channel VP Priya Raj said,"As a channel, we are not in the TRP race. As a communication major, our target is to reach to the maximum viewers who are not covered by other channels. We have always provided different kind of content. With this serial too we are looking to provide fresh content to our viewers." While no advertisers have been firmed up for the show, Raj said the channel follows a procedure of package selling wherein two or three programmes are sold as a package. 
Sahara tries a different approach to primetime
While other channels are still biting the family soap bait, Sahara TV has decided to tread the untrodden path with a
Addressability issue raised again at CII conference
Addressability. Everyone wants it but no one seems to know how it is to be instituted.
That about summed up the last session of the day as the two-day conference on "The Business of Entertainment" kicked off in Mumbai today.
But as at the Enter Media 2001 conference held in August last year (then as now organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry), where addressability was at the core of discussions at the session on television and broadcasting, this time round as well there was no fresh ground made at the discussion on "The Future of Electronic Media".
All the panelists seemed to agree that one way the ongoing friction between MSOs and broadcasters could be resolved was for conditional access systems to come into play. How and when had no ready answer though.
There were other issues that were covered by the panelists Ashok Mansukhani, executive V-P, corporate services, HTMT (speaking for the cable industry), Ravi Gupta, CEO, B4U Worldwide, and Rajat Jain, executive V-P, SET MAX. They just seemed to get overshadowed a bit.
Mansukhani spent the largest time on the subject. But then that may have been linked to the ongoing stand-off between ESPN Star Sports and InCable Net over increased subscriber rates and the fact that ESPN Software managing director Manu Sawhney was initially pencilled in as one of the speakers. That he did not make it deflated the tenor of the discussions somewhat.
According to Mansukhani, the government was dragging its feet on two crucial issues. As he sees it, there is no political will to get in either conditional access or to push through the convergence bill.
One way to accelerate the move to an the addressable regime was for the government to make available set top boxes at an affordable cost, Mansukhani said. As an immediate measure the 68 per cent duty on the import of set tops needed to be suspended for at least the next three years, Mansukhani said.
Gupta however countered that even in a zero duty scenario this would still come in at a considerable cost. And even if costs could be managed the whole process would take a considerable time.
Bhuvan Lall, executive director, Indian Broadcast Foundation, who chaired the session, put some perspective on the subject when he said that the total worldwide manufacture of set tops in a year was 12 million. Compare that to the declared cable & satellite TV population of 39 million that has to be seeded.
Dinyar Contractor, editor and publisher of trade magazine Satellite & Cable TV raised a point that the cost per set top would come to around around Rs 5,000. Assuming a C&S TV population of about 40 million at the current numbers, the total cost works out to Rs 200,000 million that will have to be raised from the end subscriber, Contractor said.
Jain, meanwhile, pointed out that in a scenario where were over a 100 channels were scrambling for a share of the ad pie, the rush to go pay was becoming more pronounced.
The ad pie may be a limited one but there is no dearth of new entrants wanting to get into the business, is Jain‘s view. According to him 30 new channels will see the light of day before the year is out.
Jain sees a lot of scope in the regional channels, especially the southern ones. According to him, it makes strategically sound sense to get strong regional language channels onto any platform as far as a bouquet completion perspective is concerned. The regional language channel market is the fastest growing today, Jain says.
