Broadband player Himachal Futuristic Communications Ltd (HFCL) chairman and managing director Mahendra Nahata has announced that his company is not interested in getting into Direct to home television, either as a platform builder or distributor.
"We are interested in supplying set top boxes to various prospective DTH operators," he told indiantelevision.com. "The pricing is around Rs 8,000-9,000 per box."

He revealed that he is in conversation with potential DTH players to supply them with boxes. He added: "It is both an open platform without any conditional access and it can also be a box with conditional access which will have encryption system to be selected by the operator."
 

BBC and Star News - eat your hearts out. CNN looks set to win the viewership battle around the US elections coverage amongst upscale English speaking Indian viewers. CNBC India is likely to be a close second.

Did the US election capture the eyeballs of the Indian masses? Did the local news channels such as Zee News, DD, Star News, Jain TV, Sun, Eenadu find viewers? Quite unlikely but one will have to wait for the ratings reports to emerge to find out how they really fared.

Meanwhile, the news is that CNN won the all-news-network ratings war on Tuesday in both primetime and total-day categories, while MSNBC pushed back Fox News Channel (FNC) into third spot.

CNN garnered a 4.7 Nielsen Media Research rating and 3.7 million households in primetime. MSNBC notched up a 3.1 rating with 1.9 million household. FNC captured a 2.76 rating and 1.5 million households.

The shares for the total-day period (6 a.m. to 6 a.m.) were as follows:

* CNN: 2.32 rating and 1.8 million households.
* MSNBC: 1.5 rating and 915,000 households
* FNC: 1.39 rating and 773,000 households

NBC led in prime time terrestrial television viewership with a 12.7 rating, an increase of 35 percent from the 1996 election. ABC with an 11.2 rating was No 2 and CBS was at No 3 with 8.4.