BASU GETS GOING WITH NEW NEWS CORP VENTURE

Former chief of Star TV India Rathikant Basu's new venture Broadcast Worldwide Private Ltd will have a clutch of four-five investors apart from attracting an investment of at least 20% from News Corp, a local newspaper reported last week. The other investors who are being considered include the Ispat group the promoters of which, the Mittal family, have close links with Star TV chairman Gareth Chang.

Broadcast Worldwide Pvt Ltd will steer News Corp's forays into newer activities such as multimedia content creation and regional language channels. The buzz in stockmarket circles is that Basu or Star TV India is close to picking up a large equity stake in the Bengali language television channel ATN Bangla to jumpstart News Corp's entry into the regional language sweepstakes. The company running the channel, ATN International, is listed on the Bombay stock exchange and the share price has flared up from a pitiable low of Rs 2 to Rs 31. In fact, there were no sellers at the new bid price.

ATN Bangla has been floundering for quite some time. It was started by renegade television businessman Siddhartha Srivastava and Calcutta-based merchant banking firm ATN Arihant International. The two however fell out sometime back. ATN Bangla, as the channel was branded was beaming off Palappa C2 and was focused on the Bengali speaking audiences in east India which number over 200 million individuals.

Star TV India on its part had in fact considered a proposal to become a partner in a Bengali channel with a Bangladeshi company in mid-1998. "We'd like to increase the penetration of the Star TV group of channels into more Indian homes," Basu had said then. Basu had pointed out then that that the costing of regional language channels is lower than that for Hindi and English channels with the bill totting up to between $6 and $8 million per annum. But the deal had not fructified then.

Maybe it may this time round.