The Subhash Chandra-promoted Zee Telefilms is contemplating launching an English news channel.
Zee is the latest to announce its plans to start a new news channel, the others being New Delhi Television, Star TV, Aaj Tak, Videocon and the Sahara Group.
"We are evaluating the option to start an English news channel. We will take a decision on this soon," said Lakshmi N Goel, director, news group, Zee, said on Wednesday.
The group already has a 24-hour Hindi news channel.
This is a part of the group's strategy to diversify into news areas and use the group's expertise in news gathering process.
"We have been quite strong in new gathering operations. We were the first one to launch the first 24 hour news channel in the country," he said.
According to him, the company is sprucing up its Hindi news channel. "The aim of the group is to provide accurate and reliable news first and we have been quite successful in this. We are looking at ways to improve the content also," he said.
"One of such initiatives is to recreate events of national importance and try to show the entire event with a new perspective. We will use our news gathering expertise and ability to generate programme to do this," he said.
The group has already made a start in this direction and has made a programme called December 13, taking a look at the events leading to the terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001.
In the recent times, according to industry estimates the news channels are high on popularity charts and have started to attract more advertising revenues.
Advertising on news as a genre grew by about 50 per cent, from Rs 200 crore (Rs 2 billion) to Rs 310 crore (Rs 3.10 billion), in 2001 over the previous year.
It is estimated that in 1999 news earned only Rs 80 crore (Rs 800 million) as advertising revenue.
That is not all. The audience share of news channels -- Star News, Aaj Tak, Zee News and others including CNN, BBC, CNBC, DD, et cetera -- jumped by a whopping 235 per cent in 2001.
In contrast, the Hindi entertainment channels' audience share increased by only 6.5 per cent while the sports channels actually lost their share by about 27 per cent.
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