Local firm channels all its energy into startup news network in India

As the broadcast industry sees exponential growth in Asia, a local company is working to become part of that growth.

Huntsville-based Inergi Design is working with Media Guru, a New Delhi, India-based media consulting firm, to launch CSB TV News, Bangladesh's first 24-hour news channel.

Inergi, which offers a range of marketing design and product development services, is designing the sets for CSB.

The partnership was formed after Media Guru's managing director, Sanjay Salil, and Inergi's director of broadcast design, Kevin Osgood, met at an industry convention in Las Vegas last year. The two discovered that they had extensive backgrounds in broadcast; both worked as on-air reporters and anchors as well as news managers.

Salil founded Media Guru about three years ago. Osgood is a former news director for WHNT-TV Channel 19.

"Being a journalist, I always felt there is no organization to help people who want to set up a channel," he said. "When we enter a market, we do everything - recruit, train, design, marketing and sales strategy."

It's a 24/7 enterprise: On a recent morning at Inergi's offices on Governors Drive, Salil looked at color printouts of a proposed CSB studio set while debating design changes over the telephone with someone in Bangladesh. Vinod T B, senior consultant for Media Guru, sat at a nearby table, sketching potential set designs on graph paper. The two were in Huntsville last week to make final design plans for the CSB set. It was nearly midnight Bangladesh time.

CSB is expected to begin broadcasting in early January, in time to cover Bangladesh's Jan. 21 elections. The two companies are considering projects in other parts of the world, as well as the U.S.

Groups launching news organizations in Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe are using state-of-the art digital equipment and the Internet, technology that U.S. media outlets are often slow to incorporate into their news-gathering, Salil said. "Because they came into broadcast late, they jumped on the latest technology," he said.

Because the stations are new and the staff is young and tech-savvy, the cost to launch a TV station in India is about 30 percent less then in the U.S., he said, and it takes about six months.

"I want to convey that setting up a TV station is not a $30 million thing," he said.

As U.S. newspapers struggle to maintain readership and TV stations scramble for ratings, the opposite is happening in Asia, Salil said, even though it has more media outlets and greater competition.

Most newspapers in India also have broadcast teams, which cover breaking news for Web or TV newscast, Salil said. Those broadcasts promote the newspaper's next-day, more in-depth coverage.

Many larger newspapers in India, much like their U.S. counterparts, at first shunned the notion of adding Internet, TV and radio broadcasts to their product mix, Salil said. But they've found that once they did, circulation increased.

The U.S. media industry is undergoing fundamental change, he said, thanks to increased competition from the Internet. He said media companies that don't embrace new technology soon will day wish they had.

"I'm surprised how far behind the U.S. is," Salil said. "Technology increases productivity, and to me that means money."