B4U Networks and Doordarshan thrashed out an agreement today that clears the way for the deferred telecast on DD of four matches and a daily highlights capsule.

B4U‘s chief distribution officer Debashish Dey said this evening the contract had been signed and delivered. Queried as to the placement cost rate that had been thrashed out, Dey would only say that it was much, much lower that the Rs 250,000 per half hour that DD had reportedly sought.

The telecast schedule is as follows:
Opening ceremony and opening match - 31 May, 11:30 pm onwards .

First Semi-Final - 25 June, 11 pm onwards.

Second Semi-Final - 26 June, 11 pm.

Final and closing ceremony - 30 June, 11 pm.

One-hour daily capsules - 11 pm.

On Fridays the daily capsule will be telecast after the weekend feature film.

Queried as to what B4U hoped to get out of the deal, Dey said: This is a very big brand equity exercise for B4U.

Information and broadcasting minister Sushma Swaraj set the ball rolling again today on the conditional access issue following her trip to Cannes.

Swaraj convened a meeting in the morning chaired by Rakesh Mohan, joint secretary I&B, which had a representation from broadcasters as well as the cable industry.

According to a senior government official, The government has instructed the cable industry to come up with an equitable pricing formula for the basic tier of free to air channels within a week.

One significant feature of the meeting was the heavy representation of the Star India team at the proceedings. CEO Peter Mukerjea, COO Sameer Nair, distribution head Tony D‘Silva and CFO Shankar Narayanan were in attendance.

Industry sources say that the Star team later went into a separate meeting with Mohan. There was no independent confirmation of this though.

On the back of what has been a tremendously successful year for the Jeetendra Kapoor family-promoted Balaji Telefilms, the production house is expanding into new genres and time bands.
Among the more high-profile offerings that the Balaji stable is readying is a 39-part weekend series that is going on air within the next two months on "one of the top satellite channels," CEO and managing director Shobha Kapoor said today, at an analysts‘ meeting in south Mumbai outlining the company‘s plans.

Slated to run as a one-hour show on Friday‘s, Saturday‘s and Sunday‘s, Kapoor said it would be a high-cost production that would run for a total of 13 weeks. Another show that was launching in the weekend slot was a kid‘s serial that would air on Sundays loosely modelled on a Superman like character, Kapoor said.

Rajesh Pavithran, vice-president - marketing, who gave a run down of the company‘s plans said the company was increasingly focussed on increasing the number of commissioned programmes that it produced and was now restricting its programmes in the sponsored category to work it did for the southern language Sun Network.

A point that was made during the briefing was that Balaji‘s top three shows on Star Plus contributed 30 per cent of the company‘s revenues. Pavithran also stressed that there was a big enough spread in the company‘s programming base that no show contributed more than 15 per cent of revenues. One can assume that Hindi entertainment television‘s top soap Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi (KSBKBT) would be contributing the 15 per cent. Jeetendra Kapoor said that KSBKBT‘s current sale price to Star was Rs 1,000,000 per episode. The numbers are revealing when one considers that when KSBKBT launched it was sold to Star at Rs 125,000 per episode. Average production cost per episode however, has only gone up 10 per cent, Jeetendra Kapoor said. Now that‘s called tight cost control.