Sahara TV has earmarked Rs 2 billion for its expansion plans to set up a NFDC style film and television academy and a media club for media personalities. The funds for this venture will be raised mostly through internal accruals and the rest by tapping the balance.

The academy will have all the modern equipment like four air-conditioned studio floors (two for films and two for video), 15 digital video cameras, three audio studios, telecine equipment, reverse telecine, 33 edit suites, DVD authoring, animation and a full-blown film processing laboratory. The annual capacity of the project will be 20 full-length feature films and 10,000 episodes of half-hour video.

Sahara will also be launching its news and current affair channel soon. Besides this, the company also plans to launch a new magazine.

The regional language channel segment has seen a stampede of entrants. After Tamil, the next most competitive language category has been Marathi wherein close to half a dozen channels are jostling for a share of the relatively small advertising pie.

The key therefore to survival and well-being is differentiation which offers value to viewers. Tara Marathi, promoted by Broadcast Worldwide has taken another step in that direction by hiring best selling pulp fiction writer Shobha De as creative director.

"As the creative director of Tara Shobha De‘ will be responsible for driving the channel and giving the channel a distinct identity and long term vision," a press release from the company says. "Shobha has extended herself beyond the confines of being slotted as a conventional Maharashtrian woman and achieved success in several areas without losing touch with her roots. Being a proud and aware Maharashtrian herself, Shobha represents the mindset of the contemporary Maharashtrian, which is what makes her ideal for this profile."

De joined the channel on 1 July 2000 and she will be working closely with Rathikant Basu and the Tara Marathi team headed by Nitin Vaidya. "Giving TARA a contemporary Maharasthrian identity will be my main challenge here," says De about her role at Tara. "Today‘s Maharashtrian is not what he or she used to be. They are breaking away from stereotypes and are not confined to the conventional areas of achievement anymore. They are achievers in every field be it technology, cricket, theatre, Bollywood or literature."

Zee Telefilms will be launching its sports channel on October 1. The channel is temporarily christened Zee Sports. Zee was counting on the bagging of the telecast rights of all the ICC organised cricket matches. But it lost out to Rupert Murdoch who walked home with the telecast rights.This was seen as a major blow for the launch of the Zee Sports channel. But the channel executives announced that they would go ahead with the launch of Zee Sports channel. The executives claimed that they have enough software for the channel to keep it going and to make it successful.
Zee has recently taken a 60% stake in the Goa-based soccer club Churchill Brothers. The channel is also looking out for similar tie-ups with other such sports bodies. Besides this, officials have confirmed that they will have cricket, soccer, tennis, athletics and other sports software for their new channel.On the recent controversy of the awarding of ICC cricket telecast rights, the channel is up in arms against the ICC for awarding the rights to its rival group backed by Rupert Murdoch. Zee executives have claimed that this decision smells of racism and that they would not sit back and except his decision and that they are consulting various legal experts to take appropriate action against the ICC. Zee had bid $666 million for the rights where as News Corp/WSG bid $550 million, which is $1 million lower than Zee‘s bid.

The Cable & Satellite Broadcasting of Asia (CASBAA) is getting active - finally. And it is on the piracy front that it is showing its teeth. It has placed India amongst the Top 3 rogue list of countries where cable TV signal piracy is escalating. The other two: the Philippines and Thailand.

"The Association will undertake and support new initiatives to protect member company intellectual property rights wherever possible," said CASBAA Executive Director Simon Twiston Davies. "As part of our anti-piracy activities significant funding has been set aside to undertake prosecutions to the fullest extent permissible in several markets."

The CASBAA Legal Committee, is working closely with CASBAA CASBAA the Motion Picture Association of America on this issue.

Recently, it spearheaded the switching off of satellite signal decoders operated by illegal cable systems in the Philippines as part of a "fingerprinting" exercise. Among cable operators suffering from disabled and de-authorised channels were the Fil Products systems in Dumaguete and Butuan. Among the channels withdrawn from distribution to the pirate cable systems were AXN, Discovery Asia, Animal Planet, Hallmark and Nickelodeon.

"Fingerprinting" enables a channel supplier to identify a "rogue" domestic set-top box that has strayed outside of its licensed market and for the channel supplier to subsequently disconnect the set top.

"This is just the start of a long-term CASBAA campaign to bring home to pay-TV operators and others the damage that intellectual property theft can do to all parties concerned with the legal distribution of multichannel television and datacast services," adds Twiston Davies. "In some markets the problem is reaching crisis proportions, not only having a significant impact on the channel suppliers but also on legally licensed and operated cable systems, equipment suppliers and conditional access suppliers."

CNN is all set for the launch of its new South Asia channel on 3 July. The launch will see a new region-specific schedule, featuring a five hour prime-time block comprising of international and regional news bulletins presented by Anand Naidoo and the two new presenters Shihab Rattansi and Zain Verjee.

CNN International will also reschedule some of the network‘s most popular programmes for daily prime-time television viewing in South Asia including Biz Asia, CNNdotCOM, Style with Elsa Klensch, CNN Hotspots, the art club, World Beat, Business Unusual, Science & Technology and Earth Matters.

CNN International will introduce locally produced programmes on the South Asian channel by the fourth quarter of 2000. The programmes will be produced by local production companies and will be a part of the new channel‘s regional news bulletins and CNN‘s popular shows at prime-time.

The network will fully upgrade its current signal to the advanced digital mode, which, the network claims, will significantly improve the signal for local audiences. The CNNI South Asia signal will be available via the PanAmSat-4 satellite.