The Pirate Book

THE FIRST WAVE OF MEDIA PIRACY The Video Revolution The Asiad Games was hosted by India in 1982 and broadcasted by the Doordarshan channel, which was the national broadcaster. The Games were seen as a means to project the image of a modern India to a worldwide audience post the Emergency era.1 Then the Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Vasant Sathe, stated, “Black and white is dead technology.

Dead like a dodo… If I had my way, I will go in for VCR (video cassettes) right away. Cassettes can be produced in thousands and they are cheap. Every village and school can screen its own video cassettes.” 2 The administrators at Doordarshan were given considerable freedom to design programs, and the government allowed imports of TVs and VCRs as well as VTRs to show “action replay” in slow motion while telecasting various important events of the Asian Games.3 The excise duty of video technology such as cameras and tapes was fixed at 20–25%.4 At the level of large-scale imports, individual as well as state administered entities were legitimized, which led to a dismantling of the older regulation model that existed in the country.

The markets were flooded with smuggled electronic goods as the government looked the other way.5 This advent of video created a sort of revolution, where the audience started discarding the space of the cinema theatre for private spaces such as their living rooms. The video revolution also piggybacked on the growth of television in India during the 80s. By 1980 the number of transmitters in the country were numbered at 18, which grew to around 175 during the late 80s.

Similarly, this can also be gauged through the expansion of owned television sets in the country, which were few in number when introduced in the 60s and grew to almost 7 million in the late 80s.6