Indian Summit '05 showed TV gains.

The Indian TV Summit 2005, held recently in Mumbai, attracted the likes of U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Commissioner Kathleen Abernathy to India's fertile TV field. Abernathy discussed the U.S. perspective on regulatory framework for convergence and multiple broadband competition with Indian Information and Broadcasting secretary S.K. Arora.

"The Summit is the first of its kind to explore strategic industry themes in both a domestic and global context," said Anil Wanvari, CEO of Indian Television Dot Com, which co-hosted with Media Partners Asia.

The summit stressed the rapid growth of domestic Indian TV to a current annual $3 billion turnover, with TV households reaching approximately 109 million and increasing cable to 56 percent penetration at 61 million cable TV homes.

Some of the speakers included Faizal Syed, chairman of Eastern Multimedia, who spoke of DTH and Broadband analog niche markets in Taiwan's 85 percent-penetrated cable market; Sony CEO Kunal Dasgupta and Star India CEO Peter Mukerjea who spoke on driving Indian content global; Simon Cothliff, Strategic Business manager of Tandberg TV who compared digital TV in India to China waiting for growth; Sue Taylor, general manager of NDS Asia Pacific agreed, who commented that digital could unlock 75 percent of India's independent channels for new venues. All speakers emphasized that India must meet domestic and global TV and cable goals in order to compete with other Asian countries.