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Then there are Anil Ambani’s BIG plans for radio as well. His company Adlabs got 45 licenses for Big 92.7 FM and over a third of these stations are already on air. The kind of aggression shown in the launch and promotion of Big FM and Zapak are very much characteristic of the kind of things the Ambanis do - Take the market and industry by storm! Quite recently BIG MUSIC stepped into the music industry by getting the music rights for the latest Hindi flick "CASH".

The Anil Dhirubhai Ambani group will also launch its Internet Protocol Television Service (IPTV) and Direct-to-Home (DTH) service - Reliance BlueMagic by the end of 2007. However, in these segments the competition will be tough in the form of Bharti Group, Subhash Chandra’s Zee (Dish TV) and the Star-Tata combine (Tata Sky). But one can surely put his money on Anil Ambani to revolutionize the way we watch TV.

If this was not all, Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Capital has stakes in premier media houses in the country - Aroon Purie’s TV Today Group (the group runs TV channels Aaj Tak, Headlines Today, Dilli Aaj Tak and publishes famous magazines India Today & Business Today), Raghav Bahl’s TV 18 (it channel bouquet includes CNN IBN, IBN 7, CNBC, CNBC Awaaz, and it recently tied up with Viacom to launch a general entertainment channel), Prannoy Roy’s New Delhi Television, or NDTV, which runs news channels NDTV 24X7 and NDTV India, and is all set to launch life-style channel.

The company also has stakes in Zee Entertainment and UTV Softwares. It is note-worthy that two of these groups - Zee and TV Today - have their presence in print media too. Zee runs the DNA newspaper while Aroon Purie’s TV Today has a mid-day newspaper named 'Today' and is all set to launch a morning tabloid too. The Ambani’s had attempted a newspaper venture in the 1980s but it did not work too well. Anil Ambani may just have his eye on a second attempt.

There is no doubt that a strong position in the telecom segment with Reliance Communications will be of immense help for Anil Ambani to strengthen his foothold as a media giant. A strong backbone of fiber optic network of Reliance Communications will be a shot in the arm for ADAG. With the telecom industry set to go ahead with a giant leap with 3G, the content bank that Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group is creating will surely be a huge asset for the group.

Concluded.

* Contributed by: -
Shekhar Arya,
MBA 2nd Year,
Department of Management Studies,
Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.