MASS MEDIA AND COMMUNICATION

T elevision Television programming was introduced experimentally in India to promote rural development as early as . Later, the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) broadcasted directly to community viewers in the rural areas of six states between August and July . These instructional broadcasts were broadcast to , TV sets directly for four hours daily. Meanwhile, television stations were set up under Doordarshan in four cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Srinagar and Amritsar) by .

Three more stations in Kolkata, Chennai and Jalandhar were added within a year. Every broadcasting centre had its own mix of programmes, comprising news, children’s and women’s programmes, farmers’ programmes as well as entertainment programmes. As programmes become commercialised and were allowed to carry advertisements of their sponsors, a shift in the target audience was evident. Entertainment programmes grew and were directed to the urban consuming class.

The advent of colour broadcasting during the Asian Games in Delhi and the rapid Identify a cross section of people from an older generation. Find out from them what television programmes consisted of in the 1970s and 1980s? Did many of them have access to television? T elevision In there was one state controlled TV channel Doordarshan in India.

By there were almost channels. Privately run satellite channels have multiplied rapidly since the mid-1990s. While Doordarshan broadcasts over channels there were about private television networks broadcasting in . The staggering growth of private satellite television has been one of the defining developments of contemporary India.

In , million individuals watched satellite TV on an average every week. This number went up to million in . The number of homes with access to satellite TV has jumped from million in to million in . Satellite subscription has now penetrated percent of all TV homes.

The Gulf War of (which popularised CNN), and the launching of Star-TV in the same year by the Whampoa Hutchinson Group of Hong Kong, signalled the arrival of private satellite Channels in India. In , Zee TV, a Hindi-based satellite entertainment channel, also began beaming programmes to cable television viewers in India. By , private cable and satellite channels were available including several that focused exclusively on regional- language broadcasting like Sun-TV, Eenadu-TV, Udaya-TV, Raj-TV, and Asianet. Meanwhile, Zee TV has also launched several regional networks, broadcasting in Marathi, Bengali and other languages.

Read the text carefully. . Do you think readers have changed or newspapers have changed? Discuss.

. Discuss the term infotainment. Can you think of examples? What do you think the effect of infotainment will be?