Kabul TV stations rely heavily on foreign and imported programs, prime time Kabul TV (6:00 to 9:00pm) is pretty much dominated by bollywood dramas. Whenever I flip through afghan TV stations in prime time its drama in all ten stations. That is not really offering much choice for the viewer. I was wondering why they do it. partly because second hand programs are all they can afford, since there is no copy right law in Afghanistan I doubt if they pay anything to producer, but also because second hand programs provide a higher rate of return than original production. Audiences watch drama and they have many choices of drama.
the import culture in TV stations is changing, the programs now goes behind prime time brainwashing bollywood dance and hyper tragedy, imported content is spreading out of movies and drama series, there are more and more programs which are imported.
The question I would like to ask is where will bollywood drama culture take us? In an unregulated media market, or I’d rather say badly regulated in case of afghanistan, the greater the degree of conformity in audience tastes, the greater the tendency towards competitive duplication, this seems like a vicious circle where the TV stations decided to jump, diversity in programming would only occur in Afghan TV market if the number of channels is large enough to exhaust the profits in competitive drama duplication, afghan advertisement market already finds it difficult to sustain the existing number of TV stations, as a matter of fact the majority of them are not dependent on market but rather on political parties and foreign funding.
Foreign programs are generally subject to a ‘cultural discount’ i.e. they sell for less than domestically made programs of the same type, at the end of the day if afghan TV stations prove unable to produce afghan programs they would also be subject to ‘cultural discount’.
