The encryption of Sony Entertainment Television, which goes pay by 30 June, will involve the rollout of 10,000 set top boxes, sources in Sony reveal.

Sony uses Scientific Atlanta set tops which cost roughly Rs 32,000 per box. Cable ops are being subsidised to the tune of Rs 20,000 per box because operators will be paying a total of Rs 12,000 paid in two instalments of Rs 6,000 spread over a year.

Once SET goes pay, all the four channels under the Sony franchise, which includes Max, AXN, and CNBC, will cost Rs 25.50 per subscriber. Working with the calculation that SET will be priced at Rs 8, Max and AXN costing Rs 7 each and CNBC at Rs 3.50 per subscriber, the total is Rs 25.50. However, Sony officials are quick to point out that their channels are not being hocked as a bouquet but will be sold individually.

Television companies have significantly increased the use of hoardings to increase awareness about the shows they have on air.

Although print medium (specifically newspapers) still takes the lion‘s share of advertising, the total adspend on hoardings from TV companies have gone up by over 60 per cent over last year, Shankar Shetty, associate vice-president of Prime Site, estimates. Prime Site is a division of Mudra Comunications Ltd and coordinates what are known in the trade as out of home advertising.

Shetty said the market had dropped out of the business following the dotcom bust but post-October had seen TV companies filling the void to some extent. Shetty estimates revenues of over Rs 3,000 million at an all-India level with the TV industry contributing over Rs 800 million in the current year. Last year the TV industry spent below Rs 500 million on hoardings. The figures are collated from 22 cities in the Hindi speaking belt.

Industry sources reveal that the biggest spenders on hoardings are Star, Sony and Sahara TV. Zee TV has a much more modest budget where hoardings are concerned, the sources say. As for how much a Star or Sony spend, the sources said the figure was over Rs 100 million. And of this the biggest chunk was taken by Mumbai, with a Rs 70 million spend (per channel).

Sony Entertainment Television is off DTH television screens in the US for the past four days. The reason: DTH provider Direct TV has switched off the signal.

According to Sony Entertainment Television India officials, the channel had a franchise agreement with the Ethnic American Broadcasting Corporation (EABC) which was trying to bring together a bouquet of several language channels, including Arabic, Chinese and Russian. But it failed when its entire investment planning went awry.

Sony has since then been working on bringing the Sony Entertainment signal back on air and is in talks with another DTH service provider in the US. The courts are supposed to reach a decision by mid-next week, following which Sony officials will be in a position to make some announcements. Sony officials say Sony Entertainment should be back on track within the next 15 days.

AXN channel, part of the Sony Entertainment Television franchise, yesterday announced its new programming strategy which would be built around five programme slots - series, movies, adventure & reality, lifestyle sports and animation.

While elaborating on the new initiative, Shantonu Aditya, senior vice president franchise channels and distribution, announced a slew of new programmes in the reality genre. Billed as the "extraordinary month", the programmes unveiled included the sequel to the "Survivor" series, "Survivor 2: The Australian Outback". Also showcased were three new series - "Ripley‘s Believe It or Not", "Core Culture" and "Exploring the Unknown".

Queried on how the original "Survivor", which attracted over 50 million viewers in the US in its final episode, fared in India, Aditya would only say that when the series was on air, it managed to capture 26 per cent of Indian audiences tuning into English programmes.

The final episode of "Survivor 2: The Australian Outback" aired on CBS in the US on Thursday and Tina Wesson, a nurse from Tennessee, walked away with the $ 1 million prize, it has been reported. "Survivor 2" never managed the kind of viewership that "Survivor" brought in but it was still a success for CBS. How Indian audiences take to "Survivor 2" considering the less than spectacular run of the original "Survivor" in India will be watched with interest.

AXN, which essentially targets 18 to 34-year-olds, currently reaches 18 million C&S households in India, Aditya said, quoting AC Nielsen TAM data. This was over 80 per cent growth from the 10 million penetration recorded in April last year, he added.

An interesting statistic that Aditya provided was that contrary to the general feeling that the channel had a largely young male viewership, 41 per cent of AXN‘s audience was female. This figured favourably with the norm in the west which had a 46:54 female to male ratio, Aditya said.