• PAGE ONE
• INDEX
• HOME

Nexus piggbackers

Businesses would come to a standstill if an organisation were to share its incremental prosperity with another merely because the inflow arose out of a nexus with the latter, says S. Murlidharan.

PEOPLE are falling over themselves to be the first one to call the Star TV during the appointed time to take a crack at the jackpot of Rs. 1 crore offered by the Kaun Banega Crorepati programme hosted by the teenage heart-throb of yesteryear Amitabh Bach chan. The telephone service providers, mainly DTS and MTNL, are raking in a lot of moolah, riding piggyback on the programme. This incremental revenue, it is argued in a section of the media, should be shared with the TV channel. They even have the ratio figured out: 25:75 with 25 going to the TV channel, the going rate, according to them, in some developed countries.

Going a step further, they would expect airlines ferrying the potential lucky passengers and the hotels accommodating them to share their incremental revenue with the TV channel. Nobody can grudge should a TV channel wangle a good deal with a hotel. Inde ed many discerning organisations extract sizeable discounts from the hospitality industry during the off-season. But instituting a rigid formula faces not only immediate rejection (DTS and MTNL may refuse even to entertain such request with basic and lon g-distance telephony largely their monopoly) but ridicule too.

Can one say that the electricity boards should also share their incremental revenues with TV channels? After all, electricity consumption has definitely increased with many households switching on the idiot-box with wake-up call only to switch it off lat e in the night. Next on the firing line could be the TV manufacturers. They are selling more because our programmes are good, could be the specious argument. Of course internal wranglings among the channels as to their respective contribution would make the proposal a non-starter. To be more precise, they would get bogged down on whose popularity caused the surge in TV demand. Some of the TV channels, especially those not able to attract good advertisement revenue, have turned pay-channels and have been collecting money from the cable operators. But then this is not beset with any computational problems. All that they have to do with the recalcitrant cable operators is to refuse to give decoding or unscrambling facilities. They do not have similar stra nglehold on DTS or MTNL. While a TV channel directly enters into a contract with a hotel and may in the process end up striking a bargain, the same is not true when a starry-eyed potential participant picks up the phone and talks to the TV channel.

In the milieu of economic freedom in which subsidies are looked with disfavour, it is amazing that someone should be asked to share his incremental prosperity with others even assuming that such prosperity has a nexus with the latter. There is nothing wr ong in taking commission for services rendered. If TV channels can justify their demand for revenue sharing with telephone companies, other entities who are flooded with telephone calls too can.

Suppose an education body such as CBSE agrees to tell results with marks on phone either manually or electronically, it too can hold the telephone company to ransom. And the railways or an airline might be tempted to make money out of a misfortune -- whe n a mishap happens relatives of the affected people do flood them with calls and it would be then a perfectly justified, though perverse, ground to demand a percentage of incremental revenue from the telephone department.

Let us make an about turn. Will a TV channel pay the telephone company? After all it takes two to tango. But for the telephone company such programmes cannot take off much less thrive. Will it pay critics and media analysts for the rave reviews they give , given the fact that reviews do count in the quantity of viewership? Viewership determines the advertisement revenue.

If organisations start keeping tab on each other to receive and pay commission to each other not for services rendered but on remote if not extraneous grounds, business would come to a standstill. Let us not follow a practice merely because it has its or igins in the West.