Govt likely to decide on FDI in media on Friday: I&B Minister

The government is likely to decide on allowing foreign direct investment (FDI) in media later on Friday, Manish Tewari, minister for information and broadcasting, said on the Confederation of Indian Industry’s Big Picture Summit in New Delhi on 13 September 2013.

“As we speak, there is an inter-ministerial committee which is considering the issue today. I can’t second-guess what the inter-ministerial committee would come to,” said Tewari. 

 “Despite a relative slowdown in the broader economy, the Indian entertainment and media industry has exhibited rather robust growth in the past year. From Rs.80,500 crore in 2011, revenues have grown to Rs.96,500 crore in 2012. While TV and print sectors would dominate the industry with 40% and 22% of contribution to gross revenues, this mix would change by 2017, with 28% of the industry revenue coming from Internet access,” he added.

Tewari said, “At a point in time when iconic print institutions around the world are shutting shop, the Indian print industry continues to grow at a very robust rate of 10%. By 2017, it would be the 6th largest print market in the world.”

On the broadcast sector, Tewari said news broadcasters need to change their content strategy.

“The irony really is the broadcasting sector... between 1991 and 2013 has grown from one TV channel to 798 at the last count. But news broadcasting represents only 7% of the entire television universe,” he said. “I do think they require help with their distribution scheme and the government has been very proactively working to see where the bottlenecks with regard to distribution are streamlined as much as possible in the short time that we have started implementing digitization.”

Uday Shankar, chief executive officer, Star India Pvt. Ltd, said. “Successive governments have created a web of policies and regulations which while they may have had the honourable intent of protecting the consumer has had exactly the opposite effect.”

He highlighted the restrictions on tariff in particular, saying these hinder news channels from producing good quality of content.

Source: http://cablequest.org/news/national-news/item/3208-govt-likely-to-decide-on-fdi-in-media-on-friday-i-b-minister.html
Source: http://cablequest.org/news/national-news/item/3208-govt-likely-to-decide-on-fdi-in-media-on-friday-i-b-minister.html