But if you are talking about the general elections coverage, Aaj Tak and NDTV remained the leaders followed by STAR News and ZEE News. Where does Sahara stand?
A. We don’t want to be part of this rat race any more because if tomorrow there are two or three more channels in the domain, we might be placed as the eighth channel. As I said earlier, we want to position our channels as classy channel, and could probably become a bilingual channel giving news in English. Had we gone by the TAM reports, we would have launched our national channel only from Mumbai and Delhi. This is also the reason why you see lots of asinine shows being generated from Mumbai. It’s not that there is huge demand for these kinds of shows but it certainly generates numbers and thus advertising. At the end of the day, what matters is the amount of advertising revenues one generates. For instance, NDTV 24×7, which has lower GRPs than its sister channel NDTV India, generates more advertising revenues as it caters to a niche segment and high-end products advertise in the channel. Likewise during the general elections, we were the No.3 channel in terms of advertising revenues
