The Raghav Bahl-promoted Television Eighteen India Ltd, a television software producer and broadcaster which holds 49 per cent stake in CNBC India, has just signed a deal with Star India to produce an entertainment based programme for the channel.

The signing of the show, whose name is still under wraps, marks a fresh phase in the programming thrust of TV18, according to Haresh Chawla, CNBC India CEO. TV18 would now be looking at increasing the number of such shows across channels, Chawla said. While not being entirely invisible outside the CNBC India channel, TV18‘s presence has been low key for the last five months or so. This was because all available resources for content development were being mopped up by the 24-hour business channel, company officials say. Currently, CNBC India airs an average of 11 hours of India-centric programming a day, all of which is produced by TV18.

The new show is essentially a talent search for people across the whole spectrum of the arts, company officials say. The show, whose name the officials didn‘t want revealed, is scheduled to launch in July and will be a return of sorts for TV 18 to Star. In fact the company shot into prominence with The India Show (later the Amul India Show) on Star Plus in 1993. India Show went on to become the longest running series on Indian satellite television and won the Asia TV Awards for two years running. Talks are on for two more serials for which pilots have been done, officials say.

While the focus at present was on the Star projects, pitches were also being made to Sony and Zee, company officials said. Sony had expressed interest in a few serial concepts but these were still at the discussion stage, the officials said.

Currently TV18 has two programmes airing on Channel V - Late Night V and Very V - available to viewers in the UK on the BSkyB Network.

In what is claimed to be a unique concept for the media and entertainment sector, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) is organising on 7 and 8 August the Enter Media 2001 conference. The conference will be the culmination of an online interactive initiative beginning end June whose aim is to identify the key issues which the industry needs to address.

The organisers hope that the issues that Enter Media 2001 cover will help in charting a future course for the industry to achieve global standards.

To delienate the key issues, message boards on a Enter Media 2001/CII website will be specially created. These message boards - to be gathered from industry executives and the public at large - will represent a "market snapshot" across each of the industry verticals. The idea is to define constraints and highlight possible solutions, according to the chairman of the task force set up to organise the conference, Biren Ghose, CEO of UTV Interactive.

Others on the taskforce include Shyam Benegal (Films), Pritish Nandy (CEO Pritish Nandy Communication), Abhik Mitra (Music), Sumantra Dutta (Star India Ltd, Radio), Vijay Mukhi (Technology), Pallavi Jha (CII Chairperson - Maharashtra), Rana Kapoor / Vijay Jain (Banking), Rajesh Jog (Venture Capital) and SK Chakraborty (Industrial Development Bank of India). The venue of the conference is the ITC Grand Maratha Sheraton in Mumbai‘s western suburb of Andheri.

Daily sports news programming during prime time is not proving as difficult as some feared for ESPN-Star Sports (ESS). Sportsline on Star Sports and the Hindi-language SportsCenter have both found audiences despite being pitted against daily soaps, a company release states.

Following on the success of SportsCenter, which debuted in March in India, the programme will be launched in Mandarin and English across the rest of Asia and China starting August.

Nearly 30 million people have tuned in to Star Sports to watch Sportsline since its launch last September, while close on 10 million watched ESPN‘s Hindi-language SportsCenter in just its first nine weeks of broadcast, the release says.

According to ESS managing director Rik Dovey, these figures are encouraging. "The 10 PM time slot is tough with our bulletins up against the top local serials and soap operas, so we are pleased to be carving out an audience for our programmes.

Sportsline, India‘s first live half-hour sports news programme, offers viewers international sports news from an Indian perspective, together with comprehensive coverage of domestic sporting events.

Sportsline has proved a good example of interactivity too as large numbers of Indian viewers log onto the company‘s website, espnstar.com, to participate in "Your Shout", an online extension of the programme. More than 10,000 people have responded to the weekly poll that invites viewers to vote on issues raised in the on-air programme.

SportsCenter on ESPN has performed well too since it debuted in India in March this year, presented in Hindi by Darain Shahidi. Within nine weeks of the India launch, 24 per cent of the cable audience had tuned in to SportsCenter. Again, the figures for upscale males were prominent, with 26 per cent of this universe having watched the programme. The information has been collated from market research agency ORG-Marg‘s Intam data, the release says.