ITV

Category: News Headline

  • Windies tour: SC bars Doordarshan from coercing Ten Sports on feed share

    Windies tour: SC bars Doordarshan from coercing Ten Sports on feed share

    NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court has brought to an abrupt halt pubcaster Doordarshan’s “unfettered acess” to coverage of the India cricket team’s tours abroad.

    In a ruling that will for the present hold only for the forthcoming West Indies tour by the Indian cricket team, the apex court ordered today that Ten Sports has exclusive telecast rights to the series and need not share it with the pubcaster.

    A two-judge Bench comprising Justice Ashok Bhan and Justice LK Panta directed that Prasar Bharati (which manages DD) will not take any coercive step or action for taking the live feed of the matches, a Press Trust of India report said.

    India is scheduled to play five one-day matches and four Tests in the Caribbean in a tour that kicks off with the first ODI on 18 May.

    The court, according to one of the parties involved in the case, said that the clause in the downlink guidelines relating to making available feeds of all events of national importance to DD on a mandatory basis lacks proper legal teeth.

    In the absence of a detailed and written order, which will be issued later by the court, the ramification of this order cannot be fully gauged in terms of the overall downlink guidelines, which is being sought to be implemented by the government from 10 May by when all stipulations have to be fulfilled by a channel to get landing rights in India.

    “Going by what the court has said DD will have to do without the West Indies tour, but the ruling is limited to only Ten Sports and the cricket tour concerned for the present,” DD director-general Navin Kumar told Indiantelevision.com.

    Asked if DD will be restrained from carrying French Open tennis, for which Ten Sports holds exclusive rights for the region, Kumar added, “I suppose Ten Sports will have to move a separate application in the court for that. We cannot comment at the moment on what will be our future course of action.”

    Last week, Dubai-headquartered Ten Sports had moved the court arguing that if interim relief was not granted to it this time round, a judgment of the court delivered before the recent Indo-Pak series would become infructuous.

    Taj Television Ltd, owner of Ten Sports, had in its original petition on the matter sought a stay on the government guidelines making it mandatory for the sports channels to share feed of sporting events of national importance with Prasar Bharati.

    It also contended that the court should be guided by the earlier verdict in the India-Pakistan series wherein DD was just a carrier of the Ten Sports signals on its terrestrial network and had also deposited a sum of Rs 150 million in the court towards possible compensation to Ten Sports.

    Ten had said it has already sold distribution rights of the West Indies tour to Set Discovery Pvt Ltd, which will have the right to license throughout the country.

    The Bench had given an inkling on its thinking on the matter at the last hearing itself in actual fact. During the brief hearing last Friday, the Bench observed that last time it was a series with Pakistan and “matches of Indo-Pak series are different from the others.” It added, “For West Indies, many people may not be interested.”

  • Weston launches DTH ready TV ‘SAT 20’

    MUMBAI: Consumer electronics company Weston has launched SAT-20, a Direct to Home (DTH) ready colour television targeted at millions of Indian households having no cable or satellite connection.
     

    SAT 20 is a 51 cm TV having an inbuilt satellite receiver can help a consumer view free to air 37 TV Channels including 17 Doordarshan Channels and 17 Radio channels including two FM channels. SAT 20 is priced at Rs 7790. It carries two-year warranty and has 256 programme and also a child lock facility.

     

    The product is available across the length and Breadth of the country through Weston‘s strong 1700 dealer network. It is targeted at remote hill areas, rural India, defense establishments, remote schools and other educational institutes, states an official release.
     

    “SAT 20 is a relief from cable bills .The advantage of this CTV is that even at the remotest of the corners in the country a customer will have the advantage of accessing his/her favorite channels available on the free to air channels. A initiative which will keep the masses in tune with the latest programming in this World,” says Weston MD Sunil Vachani.

     

    “Weston‘s SAT 20 TV incorporates a DTH decoder with television hardware & developed a common software to enable the control of normal television and DTH function with the same remote and does not need a separate set top box,” adds Weston VP Marketing Sunil Sethi.

     

    “SAT 20 is yet another innovation from Weston that is aimed specifically towards millions of consumers in India who do not have access to cable and satellite networks, particularly in the non-metro and remote areas. Known for its technology innovation, Weston has developed this technology at its own R&D facility,” says Sethi.
  • Balaji Telefilms Q4 net at Rs 155 million

    Balaji Telefilms Q4 net at Rs 155 million

    MUMBAI: Balaji Telefilms has posted a net profit of Rs 155.03 million for the quarter ended 31 March 2006 as compared to Rs 96.47 million a year ago.

    The total income has increased to Rs 781.40 million, up from Rs 568.44 million during this period.

    For the entire fiscal, the company has posted a net profit of Rs 596.428 million as against Rs 412.962 million for the year ended 31 March 2005.

    Total income for the year was Rs 2.9 billion, up from Rs 2.01 billion a year ago.

    The board of directors has recommended a full and final dividend of Rs 3 per share (150 per cent on par value of Rs 2 per share), subject to the approval of members at the ensuing annual general meeting.

    Balaji Telefilms chief financial officer V Devarajan has put in his papers, the company said. Sandeep Jain will take over as the CFO of the company.

  • 694 mn people use internet worldwide: Survey

    694 mn people use internet worldwide: Survey

    MUMBAI: A total of 694 million people, age 15+, used the internet worldwide from all locations in March 2006, representing 14 per cent of the world’s total population within this age group.

    These findings were delivered by the US-based comScore Networks, which looked at countries that comprise 99 per cent of the global internet population.

    The company also announced the launch of comScore World Metrix, which provides an estimate of global online audience size and behavior.

    comScore World Metrix includes measurement of the major Asian countries, including China, Japan, India and Korea, which represent nearly 25 per cent of the total worldwide online population (or 168.1 million users), and which, in the aggregate, are 11 per cent larger than the U.S. (152 million users).

    “Today, the online audience in the U.S. represents less than a quarter of Internet users across the globe, versus ten years ago when it accounted for two-thirds of the global audience,” said comScore Media Metrix president and CEO Peter Daboll. “This is a sea change of enormous proportion, and comScore is pleased to be able to provide measurement to aid the world’s largest marketers in understanding how the world uses the Internet.”

    MSN International vice president of sales Chris Dobson said, “Previously, MSN has attempted to harmonize disparate sources of data to get a global view. The fact that comScore World Metrix data are produced with a consistent methodology worldwide will make a significant difference, enabling us to analyze what is happening globally and truly understand consumer online behavior.”

    “This is a significant step forward for the industry and timed perfectly as the importance of markets outside the US grows, especially rapidly developing countries like China and India, which up to now have not enjoyed such insight,” he added.

    Top 15 Online Populations by Country, Among Visitors Age 15+*March 2006
    Total Worldwide – All Locations
    Unique Visitors (000)
    Source: comScore World Metrix
    Unique Visitors
    (000)
    Worldwide Total 694,260
    China
    74,727
    India 16,713

    comScore also issued a preview of the top fifteen media properties worldwide, with MSN- Microsoft Sites topping the list with 538.6 million global users, followed by Google (495.8 million users), and Yahoo! (480.2 million users). Yahoo! Sites however, led all global properties in page views with 137.2 billion page views during March, followed by Google (108.7 billion page views), and MSN- Microsoft Sites (96.2 billion page views). comScore will officially release World Metrix statistics with the issuance of May data in June.

    “While the ‘big three’ properties remain consistent among worldwide and U.S. audiences, Wikipedia has emerged as a site that continues to increase in popularity, both globally and in the U.S. Wikipedia’s popularity demonstrates the global power of the Web to unite and provide information across countries and languages, but the full extent of its global appeal is only measurable through this new worldwide measurement,” Daboll added.

  • Warner Bros. associates with BitTorrent to distribute movies, TV shows

    Warner Bros. associates with BitTorrent to distribute movies, TV shows

    MUMBAI: Warner Bros. will distribute its films and television shows over the internet using peer-to-peer technology developed by BitTorrent. The studio will also sell permanent copies of films and TV shows online that can be burned to a backup DVD, although the copy will only play on the computer used to download the film and not on standard DVD players.

    The company is planning to kick off the new initiative within six months and the service could be priced as low as $1. According to BitTorrent, movies will be sold for about the price of buying a DVD.

    “If we can convert 5, 10, 15 per cent of the peer-to-peer users that have been obtaining our product from illegitimate sources to becoming legitimate buyers of our product, that has the potential of a huge impact on our industry and our economics,” Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group president Kevin Tsujihara has been quoted in media reports as saying.

    BitTorrent uses a technique called “file swarming” to distribute large files. Rather than download a single large file from one central computer, BitTorrent assembles files from separate bits of data downloaded from other computer users across the Internet.

  • Weston launches DTH ready TV ‘SAT 20’

    Weston launches DTH ready TV ‘SAT 20’

    MUMBAI: Consumer electronics company Weston has launched SAT-20, a Direct to Home (DTH) ready colour television targeted at millions of Indian households having no cable or satellite connection.

    SAT 20 is a 51 cm TV having an inbuilt satellite receiver can help a consumer view free to air 37 TV Channels including 17 Doordarshan Channels and 17 Radio channels including two FM channels. SAT 20 is priced at Rs 7790. It carries two-year warranty and has 256 programme and also a child lock facility.

    The product is available across the length and Breadth of the country through Weston’s strong 1700 dealer network. It is targeted at remote hill areas, rural India, defense establishments, remote schools and other educational institutes, states an official release.

    “SAT 20 is a relief from cable bills .The advantage of this CTV is that even at the remotest of the corners in the country a customer will have the advantage of accessing his/her favorite channels available on the free to air channels. A initiative which will keep the masses in tune with the latest programming in this World,” says Weston MD Sunil Vachani.

    “Weston’s SAT 20 TV incorporates a DTH decoder with television hardware & developed a common software to enable the control of normal television and DTH function with the same remote and does not need a separate set top box,” adds Weston VP Marketing Sunil Sethi.

    “SAT 20 is yet another innovation from Weston that is aimed specifically towards millions of consumers in India who do not have access to cable and satellite networks, particularly in the non-metro and remote areas. Known for its technology innovation, Weston has developed this technology at its own R&D facility,” says Sethi.

  • Zee Cafe presents new reality show ‘The Cut’

    Zee Cafe presents new reality show ‘The Cut’

    MUMBAI: In addition to a host of reality TV series, Zee’s 24-hour English entertainment channel Zee Cafe announced the launch of a new reality show The Cut. It will be hosted by style icon Tommy Hilfiger and will hit Indian television on Friday 12 May at 9 pm.

    The first episode of the series will be presented commercial free and thus the title, The Cut – Uncut. Episodes span for an hour and will feature celebrity guests such as Jennifer Lopez, designer Karl Lagerfeld and Jamie-Lynn DiScala.

    The Cut features sixteen contestants competing for an opportunity to design their own collection under the Tommy Hilfiger label, earning a package worth $250,000. To accquire this, contestants must complete a series of tasks that showcase their design and business skills to prove their metal in the world of fashion.

    Zee Cafe showcases sitcoms, comedies, dramas, soaps, underworld masterpieces & blockbuster programmes. Other shows on the channel include Friends, Sopranos, America’s Next Top Model, ER, After Hours, Orange County and E! News.

  • Warner Bros. associates with BitTorrent to distribute movies, TV shows

    Warner Bros. associates with BitTorrent to distribute movies, TV shows

    MUMBAI: Warner Bros. will distribute its films and television shows over the internet using peer-to-peer technology developed by BitTorrent. The studio will also sell permanent copies of films and TV shows online that can be burned to a backup DVD, although the copy will only play on the computer used to download the film and not on standard DVD players.

    The company is planning to kick off the new initiative within six months and the service could be priced as low as $1. According to BitTorrent, movies will be sold for about the price of buying a DVD.

     

    “If we can convert 5, 10, 15 per cent of the peer-to-peer users that have been obtaining our product from illegitimate sources to becoming legitimate buyers of our product, that has the potential of a huge impact on our industry and our economics,” Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group president Kevin Tsujihara has been quoted in media reports as saying.

    BitTorrent uses a technique called “file swarming” to distribute large files. Rather than download a single large file from one central computer, BitTorrent assembles files from separate bits of data downloaded from other computer users across the Internet.
  • Microsoft awarded US patent for Multimode Interactive Television Chat

    Microsoft awarded US patent for Multimode Interactive Television Chat

    MUMBAI: Microsoft has been awarded a US patent for a Multimode Interactive Television Chat system. The patent was filed in 1999 by Zenith and subsequently assigned to Microsoft.

    The idea is to combine the experience of TV watching with that of fan chartrooms and discussion areas, where viewers can interactively discus the development of a TV program without having to run all the way to their computer.

    According to the US Patent and Trademark Office document, “The system has a graphical user interface that can simultaneously display a combination of television and Internet content in various display modes. The display modes may have different proportions, positioning or other features of the Internet and television content. A viewer of the user interface device may change display modes, such as by selecting a link available in each of the display modes.”

    The television content being displayed may be a broadcast show and the Internet content may be chat from a chat room corresponding to the television show. Various display modes are provided for displaying the television show and corresponding chat, ranging from maximal television display and minimal chat display to minimal television display and maximal chat display.
    Changing television channels may initiate a corresponding change in the chat room being participated in and the content being displayed.

  • Sab pitches ‘Twinkle…’ in the tough 9 pm slot

    Sab pitches ‘Twinkle…’ in the tough 9 pm slot

    headlines/y2k6/may/may196.htmMUMBAI: Reinforcing its commitment to reach the Hindi heartland, the ‘lighthearted’ general entertainment channel Sab is now launching a new show – Twinkle Beauty Parlour – on 15 May in the 9 pm slot.

    The show will be aired from Monday to Thursday and will replace Maahi Ve – the channel’s first daily after its revamp – that was launched on 5 December last year.

    Sab senior vice president and business head Vikas Bhal said, “Sab has been providing its viewers a kaleidoscope of entertainment ranging from light-hearted comedies to romantic melodrama through its innovative programming. Continuing this trend we are launching Twinkle Beauty Parlour, a show dedicated to the middle class women of India, who constitute the biggest part of our population.”

    The show has been pitted in the 9 pm slot and will have to compete for eyeballs from Zee TV’s Kasamh Se (which has been doing well), Star Plus’ Miilee, Sony’s new show Aisa Des Hai Mera and Star One’s India Calling.

    But Sab programming head Priya Mishra is confident of her product and is not deterred by competition. “As opposed to other shows in its slot, Twinkle Beauty Parlour would be a refreshing breather for the audience as the treatment of the show is light while the drama is gripping and thought provoking,” she said.

    Phase 1 of the campaign for ‘Twinkle Beauty Parlour’
    Twinkle Beauty Parlour is produced by Shrishti Arya Behl’s Rose Audio Visuals. “The show has multiple protagonists. We have deliberately moved away from the central character norm. Dealing with various lives – four families and five key characters played by the five female protagonists, the show works at different levels,” said Behl.

    Phase 1 of the campaign for ‘Twinkle Beauty Parlour’
    The three phase campaign around the show, which was rolled out some time back is currently in its third phase. While the first phase informed people of the location of the beauty parlour, the second phase had women sporting mustache.. waiting for the parlour to open its doors. The third phase of the campaign will be rolled out next week with the tagline – ‘Sab par khul gaya hai,’ which will inform people that the show is now on-air on Sab.

    Sab is also readying another show for the primetime slot – Left Right Left produced by Tony and Deeya Singh, which is scheduled to launch in June. However, the channel has not yet decided whether it will be a 9.30 pm show or if Twinkle Beauty Parlour will be shifted to the 9.30 pm slot to give way to the new show at 9 pm. If Left Right Left is placed in the 9.30 pm slot, it will be competing with Saat Phere… Saloni Ka Safar on Zee TV, Kavyanjali on Star Plus and Thodi Khushi Thode Gham on Sony.