STAR India, a wholly owned subsidiary of STAR Hong Kong, is exploring the possibilities of getting into the print media business in India. Last week, top STAR executives including STAR Hong Kong CEO Paul Aiello, STAR India CEO Uday Shankar and COO Jagdish Kumar were in Bangalore for meetings with possible joint venture partners for the print foray. The company is said to be in talks with Vijay Mallya's UB Group.
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India floated a consultation paper on playing an active role in monitoring the Indian television viewership. TAM Media Research is the sole player in the monitoring market for the last 10 years. TAM's CEO L V Krishnan says govt should start regulating all types of rating outputs like daily newspaper polls done via SMS or even TV polls during elections and not just TV TRPs. TAM is often criticised for its poor sample size, TRP system, etc.
The bad news for newspaper publishers -- and there are over 40,000 newspapers in India -- has just grown worse. The price of newsprint, imported or indigenous, is set to touch $1,000 per tonne, and this after a 23 per cent increase over the previous four months that took prices to $760 a tonne in March. Factor in the April jump and newsprint prices, which typically account for 50 to 60 per cent of production costs, have risen over 60 per cent over the last six months.
International digital marketing company Digitas has partnered with Solutions to enter the digital marketing sector in India. Digitas is owned by global advertising major Publicis Groupe. The new entity will be called Solutions Digitas. Digital marketing was not just online marketing and India is an upcoming market for digital marketing. Digitas will also introduce Prodigious digital production that manages the technology end of digital marketing for clients such as GM & P&G.
Boeing is eyeing commercial aircraft orders worth over $40 billion in the next 20 years and defence sales of another $15 billion over the next ten years from India and has drawn up ambitious plans to source products and services from India to stay competitive globally. In a little over one year, Boeing has inked five agreements with top IT and engineering companies, which will result in key components for its civilian and military aircraft being manufactured in India.
The fee that TV channels pay to independent cable operators and the multi-system operators is set to go up by 40-50 per cent. The market for carriage fee charged by cable operators to distribute satellite television channels is on fire.A plethora of new TV channels have been launched and are jostling for space on the already choked analogue cable pipe. Nearly 330 channels are chasing bandwidth that can accommodate barely 80 channels.
A country liquor manufacturer is set to launch the Radisson brand in Ranchi.
With 18 advertising deals in its kitty, NDTV Imagine determinedly chases the Rs 300 crore (Rs 3-billion) plus revenue target. In the latest TAM report (4 years plus viewers in cable and satellite homes in the Hindi-speaking markets) the channel shares the number three slot with Sony, ahead of Sahara, Star One, Sab and 9X.
Greycells 18 will launch an interactive channel called Topper to assist students in their class 10 and class 12 board exams.
IPL is all set to auction the players, following the bidding for teams by corporates. Apart from being a huge money churning excercise IPL promises on being entertaining too.
Alliance Lumiere, owned by NDTV Imagine, the entertainment company of NDTV, is all set to launch an international film channel. The films will be distributed in India and abroad. They will also be marketed through DVDs and VCDs for private viewing.
In spite of the criticism that Bennett, Coleman's Private Treaties division, which swaps advertising space in its newspapers for minor equity in small and medium enterprises, attracts, these print media companies are gearing up to launch their versions of the department.
Samsung, the consumer electronics giant, is adopting new product innovation and retail strategies to reach deeper and wider into the Indian market.
It seems inevitable, therefore, that the 47-year-old son of an IAS officer, an alumnus of Delhi University's business school and St Stephen's College, should be recognised as the country's most exciting first-generation media entrepreneur, one who is set to challenge more established players. Recognition in the form of Ernst & Young's award for being the best entrepreneur in the services category this year has been the icing on the cake in a year of dramatic action.
When O&M India's executive chairman Ranjan Kapoor appointed creative hot shot Piyush Pandey as his successor in 2004, he wasn't aware that he may be pioneering a trend in advertising where agencies put their creative heads at the helm of their businesses.
US-based NBC Universal is in talks with NDTV to pick up a stake in the latter's UK-based subsidiary, NDTV Networks. The subsidiary operates NDTV Imagine and NDTV Convergence, among others.
Mail Today offers free issues to woo readers.
If you thought that international cable television majors such as Liberty Media and Comcast Corporation will line up to invest in the Indian cable TV industry after the government's proposal to allow 74 per cent foreign equity in cable, think again. The buzz is that the government is in a mood to raise the foreign equity bar for the cable industry from the current 49 per cent to 74 per cent.
Indian businessmen in Uganda are waking up to a new threat: China. As the new age Great Game unfolds in natural resources-rich Africa, they have started to feel the heat of the dragon.
Umkal plans to set up 10 more hospitals in and around Gurgaon.
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