Readers in today’s (Feb 26, 2007) The Hindu wouldn’t have missed a full page ad showing Dinakaran as the No.1 daily in the Tamil language, displacing the Dhina Thandhi - the venerable Tamil daily started by late C.P.Adithanar. Guess most of you are aware that Dinakaran is now owned by SUN TV group, the emerging Media Moghul of South India.
- Dinakaran – the No 1 Tamil daily (morning)
- Tamizh Murasu – the No1 Tamil Daily (eveninger)
- Kumkumam – one among the top three Tamil Weekly
- Suryan FM and S FM – the FM stations operating from Chennai,
- SUN TV, K TV, Sun Music, Sun News – the bouquet of Tamil channels
- Gemini TV, Gemini Music, Teja TV, Teja news – the bouquet of Telugu Channels
- Udaya, Ushe, Hdaya News, Udaya vardhagulu – the bouquet of Kannada Channels
- Surya and Kiran – the Malayalam channels
- SCV – Sumangali Cable Vision – the cable network covering most of the places in TN
- Several other small magazines like Mutharam, Vannathirai and few other smaller TV channels.
It is obvious that it has mind blogging err… boggling domination in the TV, Audio and the Print Media and not to mention its interest in the cable distribution as well.
And what are its future plans? Anybody’s guess…..to take this domination further … it has plans to take a Direct to Home license – both the players in the DTH segment now (Dish TV and TATA Sky) don’t carry SUN group bouquet of channels. And again the group is planning to take a majority of license in the community FM services and if it materializes it will enable its reach to almost every nook and corner.
The other related area in which right now it doesn’t have its presence is ISP or Internet distribution (any time SCV will be able to do a Hathway kind of job), Mobile Media and online Internet content. With its deep pockets, political connections and ruthless execution it is not impossible for them to get what they want in the near future if they decide to enter this segment also - Aircel, Chennai Online, Sulekha Classifieds could be their potential takeover targets.
The purpose of this posting is not debate the merits and demerits of the almost monopoly dominance the SUN TV group is getting into. It got into this situation by being the early entrant (guess from 1992 onwards), good vision, good business acumen and execution.
May be having your Grand Father as a CM and your (late) father and brother as union ministers would have helped here and there, but none can take the credit away from Mr.Kalanidhi Maran in building such a big empire.
But still there are a lot of questionable practices followed by them in this growth period. In a series of postings I will be highlighting them with my perspective.
1 comment:
Great work.
Post a Comment