It offers a comprehensive view of the media business in India and a clear sense of how this industry operates.

The revised edition of this bestselling book presents a comprehensive and detailed perspective on the current state of the Indian media industry. With revised and updated statistics, Vanita Kohli presents a strong and well-researched guidebook to the difficult and confusing terrain of the Indian media business. Combining data with rigorous analysis, this new edition covers several new topics and presents a sound foundation to understanding the fundamental principles and concepts needed to understand media industries and issues in the converging media environment.

With Its Many Unusual Insights And Comprehensive Coverage, This Unique Book Will Attract A Wide Readership. Besides Students Of Mass Communication, Media Business And Advertising, It Will Be Of Equal Interest To Analysts, Media Professionals, Investment Bankers, Advertising And Pr Professionals, And Anyone Interested In India`S Vibrant Media Industry.

The twenty-first century has witnessed the rise of India as a major media producer and consumer market increasingly engaged with the global economy. Aided by rising incomes, technological remediation, regulatory strategies, and a shifting political terrain, the business of media has been given official recognition as a substantive component of India’s economy and as a prominent feature of its economic thinking. In light of these developments, these two pioneering volumes investigate the dynamics of an increasingly integrated media economy encompassing television, film, music, sport, and telecoms. Volume 1: Industrial Dynamics and Cultural Adaptation illustrates the distinctive industrial dynamics of India’s media economy, tracking the deeply embedded cultural, political, and economic forces that determine its everyday operation. The selection of essays serves to demonstrate the unique patterns of development and the complex field of exchanges that have constituted India’s media economy. As a whole, this volume posits a comprehensive approach to understanding the nature of media resources, the negotiation of industrial norms and the cultural context of a media economy firmly situated in the realities of India’s distinct regions, cultures, and human networks. Volume 2: Market Dynamics and Social Transactions provides a comprehensive analysis of the interlocking markets that constitute the media economy, focusing upon its particular commodity forms, labour conditions, and spaces of consumption. Taking account of a rich set of case studies, this volume argues for the necessary consideration of multiple and interdependent markets in explicating our everyday encounters with media. By foregrounding the social transactions that encapsulate market exchanges, it begins to illustrate some of the novel aspirations, meanings, and relationships arising with India’s media economy.

Indian Media Giants is an analytical chronicle of six Indian mega media conglomerates' individual odyssey from their beginnings in the pre-independence era to their transformation into powerful business empires in the digitised modern India. The book traces media metamorphoses, contours of growth and development, travails and trajectories, organizational structures, editorial policies and business dynamics of print majors in India, namely, The Times Group, The Hindu Group, The Hindustan Times Limited, The Indian Express Group, Dainik Jagran Limited and DB Corp Limited.

The very rapid growth in the Indian media industries and the vibrancy of India's popular culture are making a working understanding of the Indian scene a prerequisite for any serious study of media in the twenty-first century. As one of the largest and most influential emerging economies in the world today, India now plays a crucial role in any serious discussion of social and economic change taking place at the global level. As new commercial and political alignments take shape in the face of new global circumstances, thinkers and decision-makers are inexorably drawn towards the reality of a new India being forged in the technological and cultural flux of global media flows. Taking an innovative interdisciplinary approach to the complex field of Indian media and society, this book combines a rich descriptive account with critical analysis designed to engender informed debate amongst students, academics and other researchers.

In 2001, India had 4 million cell phone subscribers. Ten years later, that number had exploded to more than 750 million. Over just a decade, the mobile phone was transformed from a rare and unwieldy instrument to a palm-sized, affordable staple, taken for granted by poor fishermen in Kerala and affluent entrepreneurs in Mumbai alike. The Great Indian Phone Book investigates the social revolution ignited by what may be the most significant communications device in history, one which has disrupted more people and relationships than the printing press, wristwatch, automobile, or railways, though it has qualities of all four. In this fast-paced study, Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey explore the whole ecosystem of the cheap mobile phone. Blending journalistic immediacy with years of field-research experience in India, they portray the capitalists and bureaucrats who control the cellular infrastructure and wrestle over bandwidth rights, the marketers and technicians who bring mobile phones to the masses, and the often poor, village-bound users who adapt these addictive and sometimes troublesome devices to their daily lives. Examining the challenges cell phones pose to a hierarchy-bound country, the authors argue that in India, where caste and gender restrictions have defined power for generations, the disruptive potential of mobile phones is even greater than elsewhere. The Great Indian Phone Book is a rigorously researched, multidimensional tale of what can happen when a powerful and readily available technology is placed in the hands of a large, still predominantly poor population.

Indian Media Giants is an analytical chronicle of six Indian mega media conglomerates' individual odyssey from their beginnings in the pre-independence era to their transformation into powerful business empires in the digitised modern India. The book traces media metamorphoses, contours of growth and development, travails and trajectories, organizational structures, editorial policies and business dynamics of print majors in India, namely, The Times Group, The Hindu Group, The Hindustan Times Limited, The Indian Express Group, Dainik Jagran Limited and DB Corp Limited.

When Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman, News Corporation, blew up more than $870 million buying Star TV from Richard Li in the early 1990s, analysts were dismayed. Why on earth had Murdoch invested in a pan-Asian broadcaster that was neither fish nor fowl? More than twenty-five years later, with revenues of over $2 billion, Star India is one of the country's three largest media firms. Murdoch's instinct had done what a hundred investor summits could not: showcased the potential of the Indian media market to the world. Vanita Kohli-Khandekar tells the thrilling story of Indian television through its most notable protagonist: Star TV. The narrative is peppered with delicious anecdotes and a fascinating cast of characters that includes Rathikant Basu, Peter Mukerjea, Uday Shankar, Sameer Nair and the Murdochs, who loom large over every scene.