Jain TV awaits clear government guidelines before committing to DTH

(Posted on 10 January 4:15 pm)

The government has failed to clearly set forth guidelines on direct-to-home (DTH) transmission and till that is in place we will not be committing ourselves, Dr JK Jain, president, Jain TV, said on the sidelines of a rather stormy press conference in Mumbai on Wednesday.

Dr Jain was peppered with questions on his ongoing war of words with the Prime Minister's Office over his being called an agent of Pakistan's intelligence agency ISI in an intelligence report.

Speaking on the current state of affairs of his operations following his falling out with the government, Dr Jain exuded confidence that he would pull through. The fundamentals of his operations were quite strong, he said.

Queried on how the channel's revenues would be affected keeping in mind that the government was not advertising on his channel, Dr jain said there were no ads in the first place so the question of loss of revenues on that score was irrelevant.

Queried on what were his plans vis-a-vis his channel, he said Jain TV was just one of his interests. He wanted to get into the internet business and was very keen to develop e-commerce activities he said. Towards that end Jain was going ahead with its broadband plans and was already providing feeds to a number of clients, he said.

Regarding plans for DTH broadcast, he said he was still awaiting clear governemnt guidelines. When his attention was drawn to the fact that Star Television had announced it was going ahead with DTH operations, he retorted that Star had announced the same thing three years ago but nothing came of it finally.

The government had not even formatted application forms as yet so there was no point in going ahead with DTH plans at this stage, he said. He, however, added that Jain would be interested in DTH broadcast if and when the government was really ready to go ahead with it. It has accepted any applications as of now, he stated.

On the earth station front his plans were on track, Dr Jain said. twelve acres of land had been acquired in Noida outside New Delhi and a teleport was already functioning there he said.

On the political front, Dr Jain is up against the government of the day but he remains optimistic as far as the future of his media expansion plans go.

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