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Besides BBC, TNT and ESPN, a number of foreign and domestic cable TV systems are operating in India now:
Asia net, Asianet Global, Asianet Cable Vision, Sun-TV, Surya TV, Gemini, Discovery, National Geographic, Hallmark CNBC-Asia, Z TV (ZEE TV). See TV. Sony, Jain TV, V-Music, MTV, TV5 Asia, MCM, Jai Mahesh Veda Vision, Satellite Television Asia Range (STAR). STAR News, Star Plus, ETC, Eenadu TV, ETV (Entertainment TV), Jaya TV, TNT Cartoon, AXN (Action TV), Raj TV, STAR Movies. STAR World Kairali, Jeevan TV, HBO, etc. More channels are' coming. India will have a plethora of foreign and domestic channels in the coming years. Every major city and township in every state has cable channels.
The 'cable craze' was caught by more and more rich subscribers and soon the middle class followed in the footsteps of the upper class. During 1992-94 the 'cable homes' increased in Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Chennai and also in other big cities such as Bangalore. Hyderabad. Pune, Chandigarh. Varanasi. Kanpur, Koehl, Kozhikocle, and Trivandrum
Rapid technological changes taking place right now are a blessing on the one hand, although they can be a bane on the other. Technology is progressing with the speed of light, but one has to find good programmes to fill almost 24 hours of TV time. "What is to be delivered" is a constant question station owners. particularly the owners of Cable TV.
Some of the latest developments are High Definition TV (HDTV) Direct-to-Home (DTH)-or Direct Broadcast Satellites (DBS), Low Power TV (LPTV) and Interactive Video and Telecommunication and TV Convergence. Large screen TV sets are also coming up.
While ordinary TV scans 525 lines, HDTV scans 1,125 lines. The first demonstration of HDTV was done by the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) in 1982. HDTV can provide better pictures because the signals are clearer than those of ordinary TV. Although it is widely used in the U.S and Japan its use is now slowly spreading in Europe and other parts of the world.
DBS (also known as DTH) came into existence in 1982 It will operate in India shortly.
Pay-per-View TV
You may live in any part of the globe but if you want any satellite channel call the company that provides that service and you will receive on your monitor the programme you want. To put it another way, you get DTH/DBS just the same way you get cable TV now. Of course, you have to pay for it that is why such service is also called 'pay-per-view·. There are companies' which provide this kind of service. You can see in your drawing room, a movie even on the day of its release. According to some estimates, a "Pay-per-View" service system in the U.S. made almost 68 crores of dollars in 19921
LPTV (Low Power TV)
Using low power transmitters, local TV can be operated to serve customers within a radius of 25 kms. In 1983-84 the P.C. Joshi Working Group on recommended that the low power transmitting stations should be made production centers so that local problems could be highlighted and local authorities could take action, with local communication and conscientization among the local people. This is as necessary as globalization. There was a 10caUzation attempt in the Kheda village in Gujarat in the 1980s and the project was successful; but for some reason. it was discontinued.
Interactive TV-Video System
You can talk back to your TV set 0) in this system which allows you to guess answers for questions posed on the TV monitor. Several TV-Video games are played this way. Moreover this interactive or two-way system allows you to communicate with suppliers and place orders for goods effect payment through your bank credit cards etc. The principle ~d teleshopping is the same.
Fiber Optics, Virtual Reality
Through the ultra-modem device of fiber optics we can transmit huge quantities of information. Fibers used for this are glass strands as thin as the human hair but they can carry many millions of bits of information.
Holograms created by the computer can help one design artificial reality (also known as Virtual Reality. VR) and make plans for a project more real and life-like. This becomes useful for engineers planners, urban layout designers construction engineers and others who want to put their ideas into some sort of semblance to reality so that others can understand their ideas more concretely.
The television of the future will be more telepresence than vision! (Vision is less real than presence) In telepresence objects and human beings will become more life-like as they could appear 3-dimensional.
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