Times NOW, CNN-IBN ready for launch

Ground Zero for Reuters and CNN in India

BY A CORRESPONDENT
1st October 2005

The channel wars are back to the screen, after the break! After long months of preparation, the Times Group-backed Times NOW and the TV-18 backed CNN-IBN are set to raid our living rooms with general news channels. Times NOW is headed by Arnab Goswami and CNN-IBN by Rajdeep Sardesai, both ex-NDTViites.

Arnab Goswami

Currently, the English language TV news channel space in India is occupied very few players including Zee, Headlines Today and NDTV, whereas the Hindi TV newsscape is littered with a flurry of channels like Aaj Tak, Zee, India TV, Star News, NDTV India and many others. The upcoming news channels hope the lack of differentiation among English news channels will help them carve out niches if they manage a running start.

Rajdeep Sardesai

This will be the Times group's second successful foray into the television space. Its glam-and-lifestyle channel Zoom launched last year has already created space for itself. Times hopes to replicate the Zoom success with Times NOW. The Times of India has already started carrying reports and features penned by the Times NOW team, in an effort to familiarise the TOI reader with the NOW brand well ahead of its launch.

MNC news giant Reuters early this year picked up a 26% stake in Times Global Broadcasting, the company which will bring out Times NOW. Reuters has been in India since 1866, and has five bureaux in the country. Times NOW will source programming content from Reuters besides supplying domestic content to the foreign partner. This is Times' second successful attempt at tying up with a foreign media giant. The first was the deal with BBC's magazine division last year, which is already up and running. Recently, the JV rolled out BBC's Top Gear, its mass-selling automotive magazine in India. Times also has a 74:26 joint venture with the Dow Jones Co to bring out an Indian edition of The Wall Street Journal to India. Updates on the launch of the WSJ Indian edition are not available.

If signals from Arnab are anything to go by, one can expect Times NOW to be a sober, serious and mature news channel. He has gone on quote against over-the-top, breathless reporting which is endemic among news channels. Arnab swears by journalistic excellence, but does not believe that the breaking-news formula embraced by channels across the board is the way to differentiation. The overwhelming use of "Breaking News" in TV channels has somehow deprived the significance associated with the term, he feels.

However, Times NOW will be taking on established player NDTV 24X7 and upstart rival CNN-IBN. The latter is from the TV-18 stable, which already runs the highly successful CNBC-TV-18, besides CNBC Aawaz and a South Asian channel. In an attempt to provide the initial momentum, India Broadcast News has signed a content-sharing deal with CNN, the Big Daddy of international live news coverage. The co-branded channel has been named CNN-IBN. Unlike the Times-Reuters deal, CNN does not have an equity stake in the project.

The 24-hour live news channel, which has Rajdeep Sardesai as editor-in-chief, will have a blend of content from CNN and the local partner. CNN currently has just one bureau in India in New Delhi. The MNC news company hopes to expand its reach in India with the arrangement with Rajdeep's Global Broadcasting News which brings out IBN. CNN-IBN will have about 20 bureaux in the country, employing a total of 400 staffers. In its deal with IBN, CNN has also drawn courage from the success of TV-18's CNBC tie-up, which has redrawn live business TV reporting in India.
 

Raghav Bahl, TV-18

As per the deal, IBN will pay licensing fees to CNN for sourcing its content, whereas CNN will get access to more news content from India, courtesy IBN's reporting network.

Time Warner group, which owns CNN, already manages two standalone kids' channels in India - Cartoon Network and Pogo.

According to a Financial Times report, Time Warner's head honcho Dick Parsons prefers the Indian market to China as a destination for media firms, due to lower levels of censorship and better legal protection here.

Both CNN-IBN and Times NOW are expected to be on air by the end of the year. Most of the infrastructure and staffing issues have been completed at both channels, and it is almost time to reach for the remote. Competition has opened a bouquet of choices for the news junkie. Here's to market economy!

BY A CORRESPONDENT