News Ltd. flexes its muscle
Interesting times ahead in Indonesian television industry. At the moment, Indonesia has a massive number of national commercial free-to-air broadcasters made up of Indosiar, RCTI, SCTV, TPI, ANTV, TV7, LaTivi, Global TV, and Metro TV last time I checked. That's 9 FTA channels in a country of 230 million people.
None of them are network TV, all centrally controlled and centrally focused with little regard if any to localised programming for Indonesia's 30-odd provinces across three time zones with about a hundred different cultures. Making things even more complicated, about half of them are interconnected through ownership and a lot of the provinces have local ventures applying for multiple local independent TV licenses.
Despite all this, Rupert Murdoch's StarTV has bought a 20% stake in the fledgling channel ANTV, owned and run by the family of Indonesia's Economic Minister Aburizal Bakrie. News Limited didn't grow by staying on the beaten path.
The former MTV rebroadcaster and once self proclaimed sports channel has been teetering on the brink of collapse for the past three years thanks to mounting debts and bottom-of-the-barrel programming at best but it has surprisingly survived through a constant stream of cheap shows, pickups, and reruns.
With the mighty backing of News Limited, this will be a new start for the station but the fact that Indonesian TV scene is such a quagmire, coupled with the local media's recently discovered yet misdirected and misused freedom of expression, it's doubtful it will cause much of a concern for the big three (RCTI, SCTV, Indosiar).
None of them are network TV, all centrally controlled and centrally focused with little regard if any to localised programming for Indonesia's 30-odd provinces across three time zones with about a hundred different cultures. Making things even more complicated, about half of them are interconnected through ownership and a lot of the provinces have local ventures applying for multiple local independent TV licenses.
Despite all this, Rupert Murdoch's StarTV has bought a 20% stake in the fledgling channel ANTV, owned and run by the family of Indonesia's Economic Minister Aburizal Bakrie. News Limited didn't grow by staying on the beaten path.
The former MTV rebroadcaster and once self proclaimed sports channel has been teetering on the brink of collapse for the past three years thanks to mounting debts and bottom-of-the-barrel programming at best but it has surprisingly survived through a constant stream of cheap shows, pickups, and reruns.
With the mighty backing of News Limited, this will be a new start for the station but the fact that Indonesian TV scene is such a quagmire, coupled with the local media's recently discovered yet misdirected and misused freedom of expression, it's doubtful it will cause much of a concern for the big three (RCTI, SCTV, Indosiar).
This entry was posted
on Saturday, October 01, 2005 at 7:24 PM.
You can skip to the end and leave a response.
» Post a Comment