News Broadcasting
BT Broadcast, Dish TV in distribution deal
MUMBAI: BT Broadcast Services (BTBS), the broadcast and media solutions arm of British Telecom (BT), announced on Tuesday that it had signed a distribution agreement with ASC Enterprise’s direct-to-home (DTH) platform Dish TV.
The agreement enables European and US broadcasters to, for the first time, tap into India by jointly marketing the DTH capacity on Dish TV. Besides the Indian subcontinent, this agreement also applies to other English speaking markets in the Asia Pacific.
Commenting on the other implications of the tie-up, Essel Group additional vice-chairman Jawahar Goel said, “The deal with BT was signed a couple of weeks ago and will facilitate the playout of the Zee Channels in the UK and the American markets.”
BT’s towers would be used by Zee to send its eight-odd channels on the various platforms in the US and UK. In the UK, Zee channels are also available on the BSkyB platform.
Information available with indiantelevision.com indicates that as part of the package deal, on an average, Zee would be paying BT about Rs 700,000 per channel per month to be taken to the US and the UK markets.
Apart from providing teleport services, BT has also offered Zee that it can bring non-Indian channels to be added to the Dish TV platform, which has been agreed upon to “gauge the performance of BT,” a senior executive of Essel Group said.
Both BTBS and ASC Enterprises will market an end-to-end service that includes:
* 3Mb/s (the Dish TV standard) of capacity on the platform;
* encryption using Conax conditional access;
* a Dish TV EPG listing;
* 24 hour signal quality monitoring from BT Tower;
* full resilience, with redundant equipment automatically switched into service within 1 second of any failure;
* contribution of signals from Europe and the US to India, Australia and other English speaking markets in Asia;
* access to Dish TV subscriber community – currently standing at 150,000 and forecast to grow to 1.5 million by end-2004*;
* ultra-short lead-time – the service can be provided within 1 month of contract signature;
* subscriber management for premium channels that charge for the content provided.
In addition, there are a number of premium services, including standards conversion between NTSC and PAL, time shifting to allow repurposing of content between time zones and seamless bit rate conversion.
BT Broadcast Services CEO Mark Smith said, “In the past, there have been significant barriers to entry for European and US broadcasters to the exciting and rapidly growing Indian, Australian and Asian English speaking markets, and this new service makes it much easier, and more cost effective, for this to be achieved.”
“BTBS and ASC Enterprises TV have consolidated our international broadcasting capabilities to create a powerful channel to this key global market,” Smith added.
ASC Enterprises director Amitabh Kumar said, “ASC Enterprises is very pleased to be at the forefront of bringing US and European TV channels to satellite TV viewers on the Indian Subcontinent. Our joint offering with BT Broadcast Services presents a fantastic opportunity for global broadcasters to transmit their channels to a new potential audience of one billion people.”
Set top box/dish packages will be sold to consumers through Zee TV’s 10,000 resellers, and revenue collection and subscriber management will be handled by Zee TV’s sister company, ASCEL. According to the Zee Group’s current forecasts, Dish TV’s subscriber base, which currently stands at 150,000, will grow to 1.5 million by end-2004.
News Broadcasting
Senior media executive Madhu Soman exits Zee Media
Former Reuters and Bloomberg leader says he leaves with “no regrets” after brief stint at WION and Zee Business
NOIDA: Madhu Soman, a veteran of global newsrooms and media sales floors, has stepped away from Zee Media Corporation after a short stint steering business strategy for WION and Zee Business.
In a reflective LinkedIn note marking his departure, Soman said his time within the network’s corridors was always likely to be brief. “Some chapters close faster than expected,” he wrote, signalling the end of a nearly two-year spell in which he oversaw both editorial partnerships and commercial strategy.
Soman joined Zee Media in 2022 after more than a decade abroad with Reuters and Bloomberg, returning to India to take on the role of chief business officer for WION and Zee Business. His mandate was ambitious: bridge the newsroom and the revenue desk while expanding digital and broadcast reach.
During the stint, Zee Business reached break-even for the first time since its launch in 2005, while WION refreshed programming and strengthened its digital footprint across platforms such as YouTube and Facebook.
But Soman suggested the cultural fit proved uneasy. Describing himself as a “cultural misfit”, he hinted at deeper tensions between editorial instincts shaped in global newsrooms and the realities of India’s television news ecosystem.
Before joining Zee, Soman spent more than seven years at Bloomberg in Hong Kong as head of broadcast sales for Asia-Pacific, expanding the company’s news syndication business across several markets. Earlier, he held senior editorial roles at Reuters, overseeing online strategy in India and managing Reuters Video Services from London.
His career began in television and wire reporting, including a stint with ANI during the 1999 Kargil conflict, before moving into digital publishing as India’s internet media landscape took shape.
Now, after nearly three decades in broadcast and digital media, Soman is leaving Delhi NCR and returning to his hometown, Trivandrum.
Exhausted, he admits. But unbowed. And with one quiet line that sums up the journey: he didn’t sell his soul — because some things, after all, are not for sale.
