Riding A Hot New Wave

A little over three months on, much has changed on STAR Plus: the line-up of Hindi-language programmes on prime-time has undergone a complete transformation. As has the viewership base. Not surprising: after all, in India's satellite TV industry, constant change is the norm. So, even as the frenetic scramble to conquer the industry's latest frontier— direct-to-home (DTH) pay TV services and microwave multipoint distribution system (MMDS) television, which will completely obviate the need for wires— intensifies, there are far too many ifs and buts in the air for the comfort of the key players in the slippery arena.

But that, predictably, isn't stopping Rupert Murdoch and his Hong Kong-based network. STAR TV has acquired as many as seven Ku-band transponders on PanAmSat-4 in order to launch what it hopes will be India's first DTH platform, a 40-channel service. With the I&B Ministry's dog-in-the-manger attitude unlikely to lessen in the near future— the Broadcasting Bill, expected to be introduced in Parliament during the upcoming Budget session, is still being perused by a Cabinet sub - committee— Basu would be hard-pressed to get STAR's DTH platform off the ground on the targeted date: the first week of April this year. Yet, STAR TV's Indian boss— decisive, fully aware of how the government works, capable of getting around bureaucratic bottlenecks— is confident that all the obstacles will be out of the way before it is too late.

While STAR TV knows the advantages of a headstart, Doordarshan hasn't exactly shelved its plans to counter Murdoch's moves. Mandi House, in fact, has a strategic alliance for a DTH platform of its own with Binariang, a privately-owned Malaysian company (fronted by Kuala Lumpur-based tycoon Anand Krishnan) which holds 80 per cent stake in the Measat series of satellites. While this agreement is currently in a limbo, Mandi House insiders reveal that Doordarshan has drawn up plans for an MMDS service that will transmit signals directly from an earth station to private homes and highrises. But does the national broadcaster really need to get into the DTH business? Doordarshan's Director-general K. Subramanya Sarma told a seminar on the media scene late last year: "Launching a DTH platform is not a priority for us. Doordarshan has a tremendous terrestrial viewership base, anyway."

Several other big-time players— Zee TV, the Hindujas, Lalit Modi's Modi Entertainment among them— are, however, aggressively exploring the possibility of tie-ups that would enable them to get in the DTH business. Multinational satellite providers like Asiasat, Hughes Corporation, Loral and Thailand's Shinawatra Group are engaged in talks with these players. Malaysia's Binariang is toying with the idea of launching a joint DTH service with Sun TV and BiTV. "It is desirable for the industry to move towards a 'pay model' as obtains elsewhere in the world," says Kiran Karnik, chief operating officer of Discovery Channel, India. "This ensures that the programmer gets two streams of revenue— advertising and subscriber fees."

INDEED, the need to exploit subscriptions as a source of revenue is at the root of the tussle to jump on to the DTH pay TV bandwagon. The advertising support for free-to-air channels hasn't grown at the rate at which it was expected to. Many of the big spenders— primarily manufacturers of consumer goods— have cut back their ad budgets. As a consequence, slices of the pie in the sky have shrunk alarmingly, threatening the very survival of many of the new players. "DTH helps the economic viability of channels that cater to special tastes and interests," says Karnik.

What exactly can a viewer expect from a DTH platform? First, it will offer perceptibly better fare and a larger number of channels than existing cable systems can. Second, the quality of transmission of DTH channels will be appreciably sharper because the medium-power Ku-band fixed satellite ser-vice (FSS) transponders use digital compres-sion— a process that converts signals into binary digits, a series of zeroes and ones instead of transmitting them as radio waves— and are capable of considerably higher beaming strength than C-band analog transponders. A Ku-band transponder has an average EIRP (effective isotropic radiated power) of 53 decibel watts (dbW) whereas the EIRP of a C-band transponder, which most channels operating in India today use, is only 40 dbW.

But notwithstanding the promise of better transmission quality, DTH players will have to contend, at least for the first two years or so, with the reluctance of TV households to bear the extra cost of receiving a 40-channel bouquet (there could be several of them soon), no matter how good the service is. Moreover, the Government's decision to impose a licence fee on individuals who receive signals from Ku-band transponders will not help matters. However, STAR TV has already inserted ads in natio-nal dailies seeking franchised showrooms for the marketing of its "revolutionary new television reception equipment for individ-ual subscribers" in Delhi and several other Indian cities. Some quick thinking, and it decided to make the receiver-decoder sets available to sub-scribers for Rs 2,000 each, apart from charging a monthly fee of only Rs 200. That's an improvement on the Rs 15,000, plus a monthly subscription of Rs 500, that was originally cited as the minimum sum that a subscriber would have to invest in order to access a DTH platform.

Clearly, the DTH business is a complicated, costintensive affair and only players with deep pockets will survive. Says Karnik: "DTH generally caters primarily to a market that is not served by cable or is poorly served. In my view, this is a large enough market to be viable. However, there is no quick money to be made— it's going to be a long haul." DTH broadcasters were initially planning to confine themselves to India's major urban centres. But now they have turned their attention to smaller places, where cable operators, given the limited number of clients and the primitive nature of the retransmission technology, are not in a position to upgrade their service in the foreseeable future. It is in such 'backward' areas that DTH channels will make major inroads.

But won't cable operators be hit? "Very badly," asserts A.K. Rastogi, a New Delhi cable operator who is also the president of the All-India Aavishkar Dish Antenna Sangh. "The advent of DTH platforms will completely eliminate cable operators. And what is worse, the entire electronic media will be taken over by big business houses and profit-oriented foreign broadcasters." But Karnik's view is quite different. "Roads have space for buses as also for limousines. Therefore, as elsewhere in the world, cable distribution and DTH will co-exist," he says.

But as private broadcasters in India have repeatedly found, co-existence with the Government is never easy. Once the Broadcasting Bill— which is expected to liberalise satellite TV by granting private programmers, domestic and foreign, the right to uplink from Indian soil— comes into effect, the Government plans to auction licences for DTH services—two at the national level and two each for the regional languages. These licences are expected to fetch the Government crores of rupees every year. Will the likes of Rupert Murdoch play ball?

But the chaos that the licensing and taxation structure is likely to create is not the only problem that broadcasters will face. None of the satellites with Ku-band transponders has a strong footing over India. The ones that do— Measat-1 and PAS-4— have low EIRP— between 49 dbW and 51 dbW. In the West, the EIRP of satellites beaming DTH channels is 53 dbW at the very least. As a result, sub-scribers in India will have to acquire larger dishes— 75 cm to 90 cm— whereas viewers in the US and Europe use 45 cm to 65 cm receivers. Moreover, because of the cloud cover that hangs over this region for a good part of the year, the EIRP of satellites is bound to weaken further.

What is unlikely to weaken, however, is STAR TV's resolve to go right ahead with its DTH project. Preferably with estranged ally Zee TV, whose contract with STAR for the use of a transponder on Asiasat-1 expires in April. Door-darshan has turned down STAR's recent offer to float a combined DTH platform. Zee, too, if it can help it, may do likewise. But can it afford to? On the answer to that question will hinge the future of STAR's DTH platform. Because the Hindi STAR Plus can only be an ersatz concoction. It is Zee that is and will always be the real thing.