Catholic religious channel to launch in Q1 2002
Religious channels have been prospering on Indian television for the last couple of years.
Religious channels have been prospering on Indian television for the last couple of years. Aastha, Sanskar, etc Punjabi (with its Gurbani telecast), Maharishi Veda Vision and the MiracleNet are some of the channels which have made their debut. Now there‘s another waiting on the sidelines to make a foray: the Eternal World Television Network (EWTN) Global Catholic Network. The channel‘s management has announced that it will launch a television service for India in the first quarter of 2002. As part of the launch, EWTN will also expand the reach of its television service currently available in Africa. According to EWTN president Michael Warsaw, the Network has reached an agreement in principle with PanAmSat to move its current Africa channel from the PAS 3 satellite to the recently launched PAS 10 spacecraft. With this shift, Warsaw says this move will not only allow EWTN‘s content to be seen and heard by more than 99 per cent of the Catholic population on the African continent, but will also make both its radio and TV service available to more than 10,000 cable television systems in India. "Like the Apostle Thomas, who first preached the Gospel in India two thousand years ago," Warsaw notes "EWTN will soon bring that same message to new television and radio audiences throughout this vast region." In a related move, EWTN has signed an agreement with satellite radio provider WorldSpace Direct Media Service to bring EWTN‘s multimedia content to personal computers throughout Africa and Asia. Says Warsaw: "EWTN is extremely pleased to once again be working at the cutting edge of technology by being able to offer our Internet content directly to the end users of the WorldSpace system." EWTN has been in existence for than 20 years and telecasts to more than 70 million TV homes accross the globe. Its founder Mother M. Angelica, a Poor Clare nun, set up Our Lady of Angels Monastery in Irondale, Alabama, and then started creating mini-books with religious teachings. As these gained in popularity, she created a video series of her talks taped at a local Birmingham television station and followed this up with a television studio on monastery property in Irondale. That small TV studio has now evolved into a state of the art audiovisual complex funded totally by gifts from individuals and groups, and visited annually by thousands of pilgrims. In 1992, her vision ever expanding, with contributions from the late Piet Derksen couple, Mother Angelica established the world‘s largest privately owned short wave radio station on a mountain top 20 miles from EWTN. The station broadcasts 24 hours a day in English and Spanish to areas of the world including those remote places not reached by television. The heart of EWTN TV Channel is its show, Mother Angelica Live, hosted by Mother Angelica, which is broadcast before a live audience every Tuesday and Wednesday night. In addition, EWTN offers several live programs including the Daily Mass from the chapel in Irondale, Life on the Rock, a teen and young adult show with host Jeff Cavins, The Journey Home with Marcus Grodi and The World Over with news anchor Raymond Arroyo. The network also airs documentaries, weekly series hosted by leading Catholic theologians, coverage of Church events in the U.S. and abroad, seasonal music specials, the Rosary and other devotional prayer segments. |
Asia Global Crossing (AGC) will deploy an ATM service for Australia‘s National Racing Broadcaster, Sky Channel. The leading pan-Asian telecom services provider says the ATM network will deliver transmission at an access speed of 45 Mbps with a constant bit rate (CBR) of 8 Mbps. The new capability starts from February 2002. Sky uses its global broadcast network to provide live and exclusive telecasts of Australian and international horse and greyhound events. The ATM service will enable Sky to provide audiences with live transmission of Australian horse races from its premises in French‘s Forest, Sydney to a re-broadcaster in Louisville, Kentucky via a gateway in Los Angeles. Video, voice and data will be delivered on the ATM backbone replacing Sky‘s traditional satellite delivery. Sky Channel‘s satellite services only offer simplex transmission capacity. The new arrangement is expected to reduce transmission costs and provide Sky with a dedicated video duplex, audio and data transmission capability. Nearly 41,000 live horse and greyhound races are covered each year from Down Under on the channel. The company delivers its services within Australia to commercial customers through the Aurora platform on the Optus B3 satellite and offers a tailored service to domestic households via the Pay TV networks distribution infrastructure. It has international capacity on the Thaicom 3 satellite to deliver its service across Asia, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. AGC offers broadcasters uncompressed 270 Mbps television broadcast capability and provides transmission speeds up to 1.28 Tbps, while fully resilient hubs ensure automatic global re-routing capability. |
The entertainment industry has stressed the need for its involvement in the formulation of the Communications Commission of India (CCI), which is to be set up under the proposed Convergence Bill.
Top guns of the Indian entertainment industry strongly opposed the Bill, at the Confederation of Indian Industry‘s ICE Summit held in Kolkata recently. The bill, they said, will give the government sweeping powers to control the sector and shackle it.
The Bill, which is the government‘s response to the growing convergence of broadcasting, communications and information technology, proposes the establishment of the CCI, which will regulate both the carriage and content of the various forms of communication. The Bill gives unlimited powers and functions to the CCI, including management of the commercial uses of the frequency spectrum, licensing, tariff-setting, promotion of competition, protection of consumer interests, and formulation of programmes and advertising codes.
It will make the CCI the super regulator in the context of convergence of telecommunications, broadcasting, data communication, multi-media and other related technologies and services. A Spectrum Management Committee, headed by a cabinet secretary, will be set up under the proposed bill, to look after the frequency spectrum, and to make available for the CCI as much spectrum as possible. The Bill also proposes the establishment of a Communications Appellate Tribunal, which will entertain appeals of CCI decisions.
The bill will repeal five existing laws-The Indian Telegraph Act,1885, Cable TV Networks Act, 1995, Indian Wireless Telegraphy Act,1933, The Telegraph Wires (Unlawful Possession) Act, 1950 and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Act. Licenses will be provided to five categories: network infrastructure services, networking services, network application services, content application services, and value-added network application services.
However, the CCI would not work in an autonomous manner, as the bill provides for immense control of the government, says UTV Net Solutions CEO Biren Ghose. "The definition of a public service broadcaster was not clear in the bill, besides everything would be in the hands of the government." Another issue, which was raised at one of the ICE sessions was that the government would be the final authority in deciding the members of the CCI.
Says Ghose: "Another drawback is that there is no level playing field with DD, which as the official public broadcaster is given monopoly of terrestrial broadcasts. For more than a decade, the television industry has been its own rational self regulator with nothing against it, so what is the need for a super regulator today? And why should the government be the authority to decide what the content will be? "
Discussions at the summit also touched upon clause 29 of the proposed bill, which requires all agreements of broadcasters to be registered with the commission. "Agreements are confidential in nature, and no broadcaster would like to reveal the nature of the deal or revenue sharing arrangements reached with media partners, especially to a government organization. In revealing all this to a government body, one could as well publish everything in the papers, considering how accessible the Indian bureaucracy is," says Ghose.
Several participants at the summit lambasted the bill for favouring the government, which will have the right to intervene in the committee‘s functioning and the power to exempt anyone from licensing. For the rest, a license would be needed for practically any service, Ghose points out.
Among the industry‘s objections is the Bill‘s stipulation that the CCI follow all policies and other directives of the government, not allowing any real autonomy to the CCI. Speakers at the summit said that while there is total agreement that the government should have the full authority to determine spectrum management for defence and security, the rest of the spectrum should be allocated to the entertainment industry in a fair manner.
Ghose says a single body, the CCI, should be able to handle everything on its own and that there is no need for separate bodies. The industry has asked for appointments to be made to the CCI from among an open pool of competent persons and not from a panel of government secretaries, to bring in a sense of professionalism and competitiveness in the industry. The jurisdictional aspects of the CCI and the adjudicating officer are also vaguely defined and need to be clarified, industry sources say.
Says Ghose, "We are creating a Communication Convergence bill to change 200 years of legislation. Here is an opportunity for the government and the industry to reach a common proper framework; the industry‘s voice needs to be heard."
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