Case Study of Star Network

THE CASE STORY OF STAR TV IN INDIA

INTRODUCTION:
Despite unprecedented growth in the worldwide expansion of the internet, it
is television that remains the most global and powerful of media. According
to industry figures, some 2.5 billion people across the world watch on aver-
age more than three hours of television every day and the largest growth is in
countries such as India, a late-comer to the era of multi-channel broadcasting.
Since visual images tend to cross linguistic and national boundaries relatively
easily, television carries much more influence than other media, especially in
a developing   country where millions cannot read or write. With the global-
ization of television, the commercial model of broadcasting – with its roots in
the United States and largely dependent on advertising – as against the
Western European model of public-service broadcasting – where the state
(through grants and subsidies) or the citizens (through mechanisms such as a
licence fee) support public radio and television – has become the dominant
model across the world. Even in countries such as China, where the state and
the ruling Communist Party still control most of the media, commercial pres-
sure on television executives is on the rise . In most of the devel-
oping world, the privatization of the airwaves has opened up new territories
for transnational media corporations as the generally discredited state broad-
casters have lost their monopolies, generating a debate about the ideological
imperatives of a commercially driven media system, dominated by a few
extremely powerful multi-media conglomerates (Herman and McChesney,
1997; McChesney, 1999; Thussu, 2000).
  In India, the liberalization of the television market and new communication
technologies in the 1990s transformed the television landscape, with an expo-
nential growth in the number of television channels . The creation of one of the world’s biggest
television markets, consisting of...