History of Indian Tv

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Television in India

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This article is about television in India. For a more general coverage of media in India seeIndian media.

Television in India is a huge industry and has thousands of programmes in all the states ofIndia.The small screen has produced numerous celebrities of their own kind some even attaining

national fame. TV soaps are extremely popular with housewives as well as working women.Approximately half of all Indian households own a television

[1].

Contents

[hide]

y 1 Historyy 2 Post Liberalisation Television

o 2.1 Cable televisiony 3 Audience Metrics

o 3.1 DARTo 3.2 TAM & INTAMo 3.3 aMapo 3.4 Broadcast Audience Research Council

y 4 Conditional Access Systemy 5 Satellite television

o 5.1 Direct to Homey 6 Internet Protocol Television (IPTV)y 7 See alsoy 8 Referencesy 9 External links

[edit] History

1980s Indian small screen programming started off in the early 1980s. At that time there was

only one national channel Doordarshan, which was government owned. The Ramayana andMahabharata (both being Hindu mythological stories based on religious scriptures of the samenames) were the first major television series produced. This serial notched up the world record in

viewership numbers for a single program. By the late 1980s more and more people started toown television sets. Though there was a single channel, television programming had reached

saturation. Hence the government opened up another channel which had part nationalprogramming and part regional. This channel was known as DD 2 later DD Metro. Both

channels were broadcast terrestrially.


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[edit] Post Liberalisation Television

The central government launched a series of economic and social reforms in 1991 under PrimeMinisterNarasimha Rao. Under the new policies the government allowed private and foreign

broadcasters to engage in limited operations in India. This process has been pursued consistently

by all subsequent federal administrations. Foreign channels like CNN, Star TV and domesticchannels such as Zee TV and Sun TV started satellite broadcasts. Starting with 41 sets in 1962and one channel, by 1991 TV in India covered more than 70 million homes giving a viewing

population of more than 400 million individuals through more than 100 channels. A largerelatively untapped market, easy accessibility of relevant technology.

[edit] Cable television

As per the TAM Annual Universe Update - 2010, India now has over 134 million households(out of223 million) with television sets, of which over 103 million have access to Cable TV or

Satellite TV, including 20 million households are DTH subscribers. In Urban India, 85% of all

households have a TV and over70% of all households have access to Satellite, Cable or DTHservices. TV owning households have been growing at between 8-10%, while growth inSatellite/Cable homes exceeded 15% and DTH subscribers grew 28% over2009. (However,

some analysts place the number of households with television access at closer to 180 millionsince roughly a third of all rural families may watch television at a neighboring relatives home,

and argue that Cable TV households are probably closer to 120 million owing to a certainpercentage of informal/unregistered Cable Networks that aren't counted by mainstream surveys).

It is also estimated that India now has over500 million TV channels covering all the mainlanguages spoken in the nation.

The cable TV industry exploded in the early 1990s when the broadcast industry was liberalized,

and saw the entry of many foreign players like Rupert Murdoch's Star TV Networkin 1991,MTV, and others. The emergence and notification of the HDVSL standard as a home grown

Indian digital cable standard is likely to open an era of interactivity on cable networks.

Sun TV (India) was launched in 1992 as the first private channel in South India. Today it has 20

television channels in the four South Indian languages - Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu.Channels of the Sun TV network are also available outside of India. Recently Sun TV launched a

DTH service.

The Raj Television Networkwas started in 1994 and continues to be an important player in theSouth Indian cable TV provider space.

In 1992, the government liberated its markets, opening them up to cable television. Five new

channels belonging to the Hong Kong-based STAR TV gave Indians a fresh breath of life. MTV,STAR Plus, Star Movies, BBC, Prime Sports and STAR Chinese Channel were the 5 channels.

Zee TV was the first private owned Indian channel to broadcast over cable. A few years laterCNN, Discovery Channel,National Geographic Channel made its foray into India. Star

expanded its bouquet introducing STAR World, STAR Sports, ESPN, Channel V and STARGold. Regional channels flourished along with a multitude of Hindi channels and a few English


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channels. By 2001 HBO and History Channel were the other international channels to enterIndia. By 19992003, other international channels such as Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, VH1,

Disney and Toon Disney came into foray. In 2003 news channels started to boom.The mostrecent channels that have come up are UTV Movies, UTV Bindass, Zoom, Colours, 9X and

9XM.

[edit] Audience Metrics

Television Metrics in India have gone through several phases in which it fragmented,

consolidated and then fragmented again.

[edit] DART

During the days of the single channel Doordarshan monopoly, DART (Doordarshan AudienceResearch Team) was the only metric available. This used the notebook method of recordkeeping

across 33 cities across India[2]

. DART continues to provide this information independent of the

Private agencies. DART till this date is the only rating system that still measures audiencemetrics in Rural India

[3].

[edit] TAM & INTAM

In 1994, claiming a heterogeneous and fragmenting television market ORG-MARG introducedINTAM (Indian National Television Audience Measurement). Ex-officials of DD (Doordarshan)

claimed that INTAM was introduced by vested commercial interests who only sought to breakthe monopoly of DD and that INTAM was significantly weaker in both sample size, rigour and

the range of cities and regions covered. [4]

In 1997, a joint industry body appointed TAM (backed by AC Nielsen[5]) as the official

recordkeeper of audience metrics [4]. Due to the differences in methodology and samples of TAMand INTAM, both provided differing results for the same programs.

In 2001, a confidential list of households in Mumbai that were participating in the monitoring

survey was released, calling into question the reliability of the data[6]

[7]

[4]

. This subsequentlyled to the merger of the two measurement systems into TAM

[8]. For several years after this, in

spite of misgivings about the process, sample and other parameters, TAM was the defactostandard and monopoly in the audience metrics game.

[9].

[edit] aMap

In 2004, a rival ratings service, funded by a slew of American NRI investors, called AudienceMeasurement Analytics Limited (aMap) was launched

[10][11][12]. Although initially, it faced a

cautious uptake from clients, the TAM monopoly was broken.

aMap USP is that ratings are available as early as next day as compared to TAM's timeline ofnext week.

[11]


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[edit] Broadcast Audience Research Council

An even newer industry body called Broadcast Audience Research Council, seeks to setup an

almost real-time audience metrics system. Plans for this was announced in march 2008 and workis said to be in progress.

[13][12]

[edit] Conditional Access System

CAS or conditional access system, is a digital mode of transmitting TV channels through a set-

top box (STB). The transmission signals are encrypted and viewers need to buy a set-top box toreceive and decrypt the signal. The STB is required to watch only pay channels.

The idea of CAS was mooted in 2001, due to a furore over charge hikes by channels and

subsequently by cable operators. Poor reception of certain channels; arbitrary pricing andincrease in prices; bundling of channels; poor service delivery by Cable Television Operators

(CTOs); monopolies in each area; lack of regulatory framework and redress avenues were some

of the issues that were to be addressed by implementation of CAS

It was decided by the government that CAS would be first introduced in the four metros. It has

been in place in Chennai since September2003, where until very recently it had managed toattract very few subscribers. It has been rolled out recently in the other three metros of Delhi,

Mumbai and Kolkata.

As of April 2008 only 25 per cent of the people have subscribed the new technology. The rest

watch only free-to-air channels. As mentioned above, the inhibiting factor from the viewer'sperspective is the cost of the STB.

The Indian TV regulatory authority has recommended that all Cable operators be given 5 yearsto change from the analogue system to the digital platform (July 2008).

[edit] Satellite television

As of2010, over500 TV Satellite television channels are broadcast in India. This includes

channels from the state-owned Doordarshan,News Corporation owned STAR TV, Sony ownedSony Entertainment Television, Sun Networkand Zee TV. Direct To Home service is provided

by Airtel Digital Tv, BIG TV owned by Reliance, DD Direct Plus, DishTV, Sun Direct DTH,Tata Sky and Videocon. DishTV was the first one to come up in Indian Market, others came only

years later.


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Tata Sky Dish India

These services are provided by locally built satellites from ISRO such as [14] INSAT 4CR,

INSAT 4A, INSAT-2E, INSAT-3C and INSAT-3E as well as private satellites such as theDutch-based SES, Global-ownedNSS 6, Thaicom-2 and Telstar 10.

[edit] Direct to Home

DTH is defined as the reception of satellite programmes with a personal dish in an individualhome.

DTH does not compete with CAS. Cable TV and DTH are two methods of delivery of television

content. CAS is integral to both the systems in delivering pay channels.

Cable TV is through cable networks and DTH is wireless, reaching direct to the consumerthrough a small dish and a set-top box. Although the government has ensured that free-to-air

channels on cable are delivered to the consumer without a set-top box, DTH signals cannot bereceived without the set-top box.

India currently has 6 major DTH service providers and a total of over20 million subscriberhouseholds in 2010. Dish TV(a ZEE TV subsidiary), Tata Sky,South India Media Giant SunNetwork owned 'Sundirect DTH',Reliance owned BIG TV,Bharti Airtel's DTH Service 'Airtel

Digital TV' and the public sector DD Direct Plus.

The rapid growth of DTH in India has propelled an exodus from cabled homes, the need to

measure viewership in this space is more than ever; aMap, the overnight ratings agency, hasmounted a peoplemeter panel to measure viewership and interactive engagement in DTH homes

in India.[15]

.

[edit] Internet Protocol Television (IPTV)

IPTV launched only in some cities around 2006-2007 by Mtnl/Bsnl later Expands to many urban

areas and still expanding. Private Broadband provider Bharti Airtel also starts its IPTV service inDelhi,NCR region. At present (2009/2010) IPTV in India is hardly making any impact in the

market. But IPTV and Online Video Services in India[16]

are expected to expand. Screen Digest


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estimates broadband penetration of TV households to increase from 4.2 percent in 2009 to 13.4percent in 2013

[17].

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