SET India CEO Kunal Dasgupta is in an angry mood. The reason: the overkill of the TRP for sale coverage on CNBC India. Dasgupta told indiantelevision.com that his company‘s name was unnecessarily being sucked into the picture. "No way do we have any say in all this. And we are not behind the discrediting the TRP campaign."
"There should be some editorial control on CNBC. It appears to be lacking," he says. "If it does not stop SET India will reconsider its distribution agreement with the channel. It‘s extremely irritating," he says.

SET India had earlier gone back on its agreement to invest in CNBC India. At one point it was scheduled to take a 20 per cent equity stake, but later decided against it.

Launching 24 September is a new sitcom from the Star India stable, fare somewhat different in flavour from that of the staple soap variety stock that Star has leveraged to its advantage.

However, Star has not lost track of what it has identified as the core premise of most of its serials - the politics of the family. Produced by Shrey Guleri, Hum Saat Aath Hain for a change revolves not between saas-bahu (mother-in-law daughter-in-law) sagas but revolves around the tensions between the patriarch of a Hindu united family and his well educated "modern" daughter-in-law. The half hour serial will be aired Mondays to Thursdays at 7:30 PM

Guleri‘s Tu Tu Main Main, a series on the squabbles between a woman and her daughter-in-law is the longest running show on Star Plus.

The launch of Hum Saat Aath Hain is part of Star India‘s strategy to expand by half an hour its evening prime time band from the current 8 PM to 11 PM slot. At the end of June, Sameer Nair, executive vice-president, head of content & communication, Star India, had said Star was looking to launch the new show to air at 7:30 PM sometime in the middle of August. "This is a first as far as channels go," Nair had said then, pointing to the fact that the 7-8 PM slot doesn‘t normally have fresh content as it is considered a non prime time slot.

Star India‘s long awaited direct to home (DTH) project has taken another step towards becoming reality and it has teamed up with consumer electronics and telecom biggie BPL for this.

Star will be using BPL‘s retail outlets for distributing consumer set top boxes. The possibility of a Star-BPL deal had been talked about four years ago when the Rupert Murdoch-promoted company first toyed with the idea of getting into DTH in India.