TV channels explain serial blackout
India's TV channels, and their viewers, have begun paying for a war over wages between producers of serials and their workers.
Eclipsing their individual channel rivalry and displaying a sense of solidarirty, the channels got together to say that they were operating under a contract with the makers of serials and could not raise their payout to them in the middle of the contract.
"This situation leading to the blackout has been forced on us," said the heads of the TV channels, "we have spoken to our advertisers and they are fine with our decision. We have warned all production houses and we gave them this deadline to resolve their issues but this did not happen. And that is why the re-runs of all shows across all channels this week."
No fresh episodes of any serial are being shown on TV all of this week. The CEOs who spoke to the media included Uday Shankar of Star, Punit Goenka of Zee, Rajesh Kamath of Colors, Samir Nair of NDTV and Albert Almeida of Sony.
The producers, who are facing a demand of increased wages from technicians and junior artistes, have insisted that the TV channels foot the increase in their costs.
"We tried to resolve it but it is just impossible to have uniform increments for all shows," the CEOs said, "we have offered them an increment for prime time slots and as all of us know it is always a different package of payment for different channels."
The differences, the CEOs said, had not resulted in hostility. "Our relations were always cordial with producers, but this situation is bad and we want to sort out the issue as quickly as possible."
• Sonali Joshi, Hill Road Media • Tuesday, November 11, 2008
http://www.indya.com/news/newsDetails.aspx?xfile=2008/November/News_20081111_55
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