After Star TV Executive Chairman Gareth Chang‘s recent resignation, and NewsCorp Arthur Anderson officials have visited India twice to asses the value of Star TV, NewsCorp Chairman Rupert Murdoch plans a five day India visit starting 10th March. His wife Wendy Deng and son James, NewsCorp‘s Vice President of Music and New Media will accompany him.

The trip is expected to kick off with a two days in Bangalore, where he expects to kickstart NewsCorp‘s joint venture with Pramod Mittal‘s Ispat Group company eVentures. eVentures has already invested in two portals recently. Net Access, a Delhi based e-business service provider, where eVentures has invested about US$ 1.75 million acquiring a 26 equity.

The joint venture has also acquired 100 percent equity in netpligrims.com, a web based placement service provider. Besides eVentures deals, Star TV plans 10 to 20 percent in popular portals. The net plans to extend synergies between broadcasting and the Internet, "to increase our access to content and tap the traffic which comes on various sites on the Internet," said News television India Ltd.‘s CEO Peter Mukerjea in a newspaper interview. The strategy is via the mergers and acquisitions route, and plans are to for multi-point distribution including the Internet and mobile communications.

Besides, Murdoch will visit Bombay "to meet his office people" as a spokesman puts it. Also appointments are being arranged with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, State Minister for Information and Broadcasting Arun Jaitley, Minister for Information technology Pramod Mahajan and Opposition leader Sonia Gandhi.

Murdoch‘s visit, the first since June 1996 when he met Deve Gowda gains significance. The importance of India in it‘s Asian strategy is apparent. NewsCorp has doubled it‘s content related investment in India over the next five years. An additional US$ 20 million this year has for it‘s Indian operation. Murdoch will seeks a first hand view impression on the Broadcast bill including DTH and other regulatory issues, besides it‘s proposed Internet /mobile investments in India.

Sony Entertainment Television (SET) has denied that Calcutta-based cable TV operator RPG Netcom has switched off AXN, a channel it distributes in India, a claim the MSO had made a couple of days ago. RPG had claimed that it had pulled the plug on AXN because SET was asking it to pay higher subscription fees to continue re-transmitting the service to its sub-operators. SET COO Rajesh Pant says this is untrue and that it was actually Sony, which had switched off the cable operator‘s signal and not the other way around. Says Pant: "There isn‘t even a price hike for AXN. What we are asking them to do is pay us for a higher subscriber base than they have been doing so up to now. We are asking for higher subscriber counts. We had given them some notice but they were not interested so we switched them off."
He however is quick to add. "We are not in a fighting situation with them as of now. I expect the entire situation to get resolved very amicably across the table. Give it time."

Pant says the channel is doing fine having achieved a penetration of 2.5 million subscribers. "The actual figure is actually 11-12 million because cable ops actually declare only 20-30 per cent of their subscriber base. We are reasonably happy with out collections from the cable TV trade. I am sure cable operators and consumers see value in the service, hence we are asking them to give us fees for a larger number of subscribers."

It‘s show time folks. Doordarshan has called for bids from television producers for three time slots on DD- Metro (DD-2): 7:55 am, 5:25 pm, and 6:55 pm. The time slots are of five minutes duration each and involve the creation of film trailer based shows. Producers can pick up the application forms between 6 and 13 March (11 am to 1 pm) from the respective Metro stations.Bids are to be submitted between 13 and 15 March between 11 am and 2 pm along with an earnest money deposit of Rs 50,000 and a non-refundable processing fee of Rs 5,000. The bids will be opened on 15 March at 3:30 pm. DD officials have fixed the minimum guarantee at Rs 50,000 per weekday.

Another print medium journalist bites the dot com bullet. Managing editor of Outlook newsmagazine, Tarun Tejpal, has quit to start tehelka.com, claimed to be India‘s first independent news portal.

Tehelka Communications Ltd, the company that will manage the affairs of tehelka.com, will have majority shareholding by the Tejpals (52.5 per cent), while 25 per cent will be held by adman Suhel Seth.

"It‘s an ambitious project and we are looking at a really comprehensive horizontal portal which will not only provide news, but also information on issues like literature, etc.," Tehelka Communications‘ chief executive Tarun Tejpal said, claiming it will be India‘s first independent news portal.

The board of this new dotcom company will include illustrious personalities like Khushwant Singh, R.K. Laxman, V.S. Naipaul and Russi Mody.

In the initial phase the investment to be made in tehelka.com project is to the tune of approximately $ 2 million. The project, likely to be up by mid-May, is looking at attracting investments up to $ 10 million by second quarter of this year. According to Suhel Seth, involved in this venture in his personal capacity, tehelka.com will cater to both the high and low brow as it will have the zing necessary to attract hits. Though Seth was unwilling to divulge more financial details, IT industry sources said that venture capital funding will be tapped too. "In the initial phase about 10 per cent is likely to be offloaded to the venture capital fund which invests in the company," a source close to Tehelka Communications said, adding, "Talks are already on with a Mumbai-based VCF."

A certain quantum of the equity stake in the company has been reserved for the employees stock option plan (ESOP), Tejpal said. This has been necessitated as some of the finest brains in journalism will be joining the project, including some from Outlook magazine.

Tehelka.com is looking at having more than one model for generating revenue. One is the traditional one of making the site and detailed information susbcription-based. Another stream of revenue being looked at is facilitating downloading of magazines and excerpts from yet-to-be-published books for a price.

But tehelka.com will have to face competition from existing news sites and portals like india-today.com and indiatimes.com and some like GO4i (go for India) which are in the offing and backed by big media houses.

For example, in a two-pronged Internet strategy, The Hindustan Times Ltd, through an offshore company, based in the United States, has formed a joint venture with Chase Capital Partners with equal equity participation from both for development of a horizontal portal, tentatively called GO4i (go for India).

The fate of the broadcast bill hangs on a razor‘s edge, despite Braodcast Minister Arun Jaitley‘s pledge to table it in the surrent budget session of parliament.
Lobbying for the Broadcast bill is expected to reach fever pitch after March during the Budget session recess. The broadcasters lobby group, The Indian Broadcast Foundation has set up three committees for the purpose. Discovery India‘s Kiran Karnik, News Television India‘s Peter Mukherjee and Urmila Gupta, and Sony Entertainment Television‘s Kunal Dasgupta are looking at convergence and spectrum allocation issues. ESPN‘s Manu Sawney and Turner International‘s Anshuman Misra are reviewing technology convergence, especially the last mile infrastructure. Content provider UTV‘s Ronnie Screwvala and Khursheeda Mody, Nimbus Communications? Harish Thawani and MTV India‘s Alex Kuruvilla are looking at Internet regulatory issues. Three government committees are also reviewing critical areas in the bill.

Jaitley expects to reach a consensus during the recess before tabling the bill in parliament. Some analysts believe that foreign equity in cross media holding and DTH may not form a part of the bill, plagued by opposing political viewpoints. Others indicate that the bill may be tabled, but will go into a sub committee for further review.