Now we at the News Broadcasters Association have formed a committee and are drafting a code which we would like to abide by. That, I should say, is a positive development, because the government has seen the need to let us develop our own code. A similar code is now being developed for the entertainment channels by the Indian Broadcast Foundation.

As far as the Broadcast Regulation Bill is concerned, the government tried to say that it would be one single, umbrella enactment that would hold every possible regulation that governs the media, Uplinking Guidelines, Downlinking Guidelines, Cable Act and all the others that the government has come out with in the past.

But there were protests, not only from us but also from our brothers in the print media, from the Indian Newspaper Society. The government is nobody to give us a regulation. The only regulation that could be followed would come from the industry. The government said also that it would appoint a regulatory authority for broadcasting and this too was unacceptable.

The government argued that they appoint Supreme Court judges as well. But we feel that this was not an appropriate analogy. The fact is that in judiciary, there is independence enshrined from the beginning of jurisprudence in this country. That is a system decades and decades old. But the industry of private TV news media is just 10 years old.

So, there will be a content code which we shall bring out, but the regulatory authority may not see the light of day in the near future, certainly not in the next 12 months. We have said that this needs to be debated and taken to all corners of the country, so it is not possible to do so in a short time.

Another crucial development was that Cas was introduced from January (2007), in select pockets of the four metros, and it was a disappointing experience. There were problems in terms of number of boxes seeded, with the number of boxes available and so on. That could be an indicator of what might happen when it is extended to the rest of the towns.

But I think it is bound to happen, if not in two years then in five years. It is impossible for the television viewer to watch 500 channels in the analogue mode. So they would have to go digital. What is more important is that Cas or DTH is addressable, so ultimately the broadcasting industry, the broadcasters as well as the cable operators would go for digitalisation. Also, 2007 has been a good year in terms of DTH. TataSky was launched, and Dish TV in any case was already there. They have very good numbers of subscribers.

The fact is that anything in this country takes a long time to take off. When mobiles came seven or eight years ago, the estimate was that by 2010, we would reach something like 10 to 12 million. Today we have 200 million, and are seeing seven million mobile phones being added every month! So it takes time in this country for things to catch on, and the same will be the case with Cas. And as in the case of mobile, the costs will also come down. So eventually it will happen, and when it does, the market will be huge.

We have today 120 million television homes, out of which 70 million are on cable and satellite. And if you take roughly five viewers per home the figure comes to something like 300 million, which makes it equal to the entire populations of United States and Canada put together. So it is a massive market, though at this moment we are reaching out to only one-third of it.

If you look at advertisement spends by companies, it is something like 0.45 per cent of the GDP, whereas the global average is close to about 1.5 per cent. I am sure we can take it to 1.5 per cent of our GDP. That could give you an idea what it will mean in terms of revenues to everyone down the line, broadcasters to LCOs.

So there is a huge upside of the story. Even today in India the ratio of advertisement spends between print and television is 60/40, whereas worldwide it is 50/50. Hence, I feel this is a good time for the media business.