| MUMBAI: At the
Frames convention for the business of entertainment one session looked at the
potential that Indian content has to travel overseas. Indiantelevision.com founder
and CEO Anil Wanvari notes that the main problem is that Indian television producers
do not hold the rights to their content. The channels have all the rights. Often
the channels are not interested in pushing formats and shows. Things though are
starting to change with the likes of Star, Zee, Sony going to trade fairs like
MipTV
and Mipcom in Cannes, France to sell formats. They have met with some success. “Also Indian television
makers produce content for India itself. The cultural ethos is different from
other Asian countries. There is a cultural disconnect. It is however good to see
that Indian animators besides doing outsourcing work are also creating IP. It
is important that Indian content producers retain some rights and negotiate with
broadcasters in that
respect.”Mediae2e chief evangelist and CEO Atul
Phadnis says that in India and Pakistan there is a lot of potential in terms of
selling television sets. He spoke about the scene in South Asia. “ Cricket,
films and music travel the most across the region. One problem is that of regulation.
This is often aimed to prevent content dumping. Sri Lanka has a law that requires
a channel to pay Rs. 90,000 cess for each half hour of a dubbed Indian show. The
aim is to give local content a thrust. One area where countries can cooperate
on is that of technology. Another is that of training. They can also reach agreements
in terms of sharing talent. Content collaboration is the recipe for success.” Asia
Broadcast Satellite co-founder and CEO Thomas Choi says that digitization is the
key for broadcast growth in India. The good news is that DTH is allowed. In other
countries like China, Korea however DTH operators have not been allowed to compete.
DTH he says allows for the delivery of 1000 channels from one orbital position.
DVB-T is another platform that has
potential if it is allowed. In the UK there
is the Freeview platform where the BBC has a stake. IPTV he adds also presents
a growth opportunity for broadcasting. PCCW’s now TV in Hong Kong
is the mkost successful with half a million subscribers. India however faces a
threat from Wimax. That is because the government recently gave permission for
Wimax to operate on terrestrial C Band frequencies. The problem is that cable
operators also work on C-Band frequencies. If Wimax is allowed then the signals
on cable TV headends will go blank. Casbaa in fact approached the government about
the problem and a stay was granted. The president of Pakistan’s Geo
TV which commenced operations four and a half years back said that the idea was
to look at the region as a whole and then create content. It initially faced hurdles
like training. So trained staff was brought down from
abroad to train people.
The first show paid tribute to legendary singers from India and Pakistan. It was
done in the form of a game show that unfortunately was not seen in India. Later
on soaps, music shows, dramas were down using talent from around the region. It
was noted that Star Plus soaps were popular and a separate beam for the channel
was introduced in Pakistan to get ads at lesser rates. That caused Pakistan channels
to panic and come together. The government then got into the issue of not allowing
tchannels to air that do not have landing rights. | 
