Cost of visibility

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Cost of visibility

BY SEVANTI NINAN

With talk of money and influence-peddling filling the airwaves in the run up to the trust vote, the discussion at a book launch last week turned to the current role of money in media proliferation. Not a question of who in the media is for sale, but more one of who can afford to join the ranks of media since all it takes to become a satellite TV owner these days is hard cash, preferably of the unaccounted kind. Rajdeep Sardesai talked about builders who are getting ready to launch news channels in Andhra Pradesh as well as a former milk seller in Delhi who has the cash to spare and is about to take the plunge.

There were two prongs to his argument: one, that the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, which issues licences to news channels, is not applying any criteria of eligibility which keeps out those with no track record in media. And two, that, with new entrants crowding the market, the cost of retaining a toehold in the limited bandwidth which cable operators and DTH service providers have is becoming astronomical.

The two points are related: the more people aspire to channel-owner status and book themselves satellite transponders via which to broadcast, the bigger the distribution squeeze. So money power comes in to buy your channel visibility.

Not sustainable

But while the logic of wanting to restrict more people from becoming channel owners is evident, it is not an argument which can be sustained. Who is to decide what credentials are acceptable for media ownership? If builders were to be kept out of the media, you would not have the Outlook stable of magazines, as professional as any other, begun more than a decade ago with real estate money. Today there is also a rush of political parties to start up satellite channels, including the Congress Party in Kerala. Can the I and B Ministry summon the gumption or the legal basis to decree that political ownership of media cannot be allowed?

The most interesting case of controversial media ownership is that of a company called Information TV Pvt. Ltd., promoted by Kartik Sharma, brother of Manu Sharma, the main accused in the Jessica Lal murder case. The company has launched a TV channel called India News which is on air. Their openly stated argument for getting into media themselves is the grudge they have against TV channels for the trial by media that they say Manu Sharma was subjected to. The owner's father is a former Congress minister in Haryana. But what sort of ethical standards will such channels uphold? India News recently ran the fake MMS clips which were purportedly of Arushi Talwar, which added to the controversy about the way the case has been covered.

The second point about money power influencing media is one of access. A viewer may not be able to see the channel of his choice if that channel's owner cannot afford to buy his way on to a cable operator's prime band or a DTH provider's offerings. Such payments to buy access are euphemistically termed carriage fees. The pressure from new channels for access is so much that carriage fees have soared in the last year or two, rising by 40 to 50 per cent a year. The total carriage fee market is now pegged at Rs. 1,000 crore by industry estimates. Some 330 channels are chasing bandwidth that can accommodate 80 (Business Standard).

Leading DTH operators do not deny that they levy carriage fees. Jawahar Goel of Dish TV was recently quoted as saying that he will make around Rs. 50 crore from this avenue this year, and double that next year. As for Tata Sky, its boss Vikram Kaushik is on record saying that if a new channel wants instant access to their two million subscriber base, they will have to pay for it. Doordarshan's DD Direct+ is free for viewers but also charges carriage fees, Rs. 25 lakhs per Indian channel and Rs. 50 lakhs per foreign channel (Cable and Satellite TV magazine).

Impact on quality

And another material argument which flows from this is the defence TV channel owners offer for shoddy, low-cost programming on their channels: that distribution costs are mounting so much that they cut into their programming budgets.

Sardesai's point is that established professional broadcasters, that do proper news gathering, are at a disadvantage in the carriage game; his company's Hindi channel, for instance, cannot afford to be on Tata Sky. But that ubiquitous builder who comes into the game (or the solvent politician) with a low cost channel has enough ready cash to pay the few crores required to get his channel visibility.

The only answer to that, it would seem, is technological: more effective digitisation in the distribution system. If this government survives next week's test to live longer, it might have to address this problem too.

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