Nikhil,

Rediff also ran a story headlined “Sillicon Valley build by Indians”. (around 1 year back). And given the state of the Indian media today - such things are passable. Why check facts when you can run behind the latest thing. (and thus such errors like 90/900 smses/sec). Or it might just be that math is not the strongest of academic skills that writers and editors in India posses. :D

I dont believe this - simply because overstating these figures is accepted norm in global TV (just like hits/pageviews). And I dont think people in this country are this vella. :D

By the way - split is being talked of in the ratio of 60:40 (Sony:Carrier)

RRK

Rajesh: frankly, i do think people in this country are this vella. Have you been following the madness around this particular edition of Indian Idol? I don’t watch the show, but there have been rallies, political support, people collecting donations for voting for these guys. madness.

http://www.ibnlive.com/videos/49209/darjeeling-goes-all-out-to-drum-up-support-for-prashant.html

Audiences do get involved in voting and polling and huge volumes do come in. Some points to note: People vote first for the person from their state/city/region and then for merit, pretty much the way we vote our politicians in and we know how successful that model is.

As regards numbers of votes, the difficult part is getting true numbers as no channel has these numbers audited and so no one really knows whats actually going on.

As regards revenues if we assume that the landline to sms break up as 40:60, the share that BSNL pays for televoting is on the public domain at
http://www.bsnl.co.in/service/in_services_tariff.htm
so if the operator gets 7.2 lakhs, the broadcaster gets 1.8 lakhs or 25% and pays a sum of money as subscription. One can safely assume that mobile operators will only be marginally better.

So what were the claims again???