New Delhi : In order to give a better clarity on cross media ownership. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has releases recommendations on issues related to cross-media ownership. The recommendations cover a comprehensive definition for control, cross-media ownership, vertical integration and internal plurality As per TRAI’s recommendations, the News and Current Affairs genre is of utmost importance and should be considered as the relevant genre in the product market for formulating cross-media ownership rules.
TV and print should be considered as the relevant segments in the product market. For print, only daily newspapers, including business and financial newspapers, should be considered. Once private radio channels are allowed to air news generated on their own and become significant in the relevant market, a review of the cross-media ownership should be undertaken.
The relevant geographic market should be defined in terms of language and the State(s) in which that language is spoken in majority.
A combination of reach and volume of consumption metrics should be used for computing market shares for the TV segment. For the print segment, using only the reach metric is sufficient.
For calculating market shares in the relevant market for the TV segment, the GRP of a channel should be compared with the sum of the GRP ratings of all the channels in the relevant market and the market share of an entity would be the sum of the market shares of all the channels controlled by it.
