Talk about media explosion.
First, a second, and private channel was allowed for the first time in the history of Pakistan. And then there were these two foreign news channels, which mesmerized everyone since it was a huge huge jump from the Khabarnama.
NTM was an excellent venture. It eventually died because there were fallout’s that they had with the govts, but it was an excellent venture.
They started off with all English Programmes. It was a short transmission which used to start at 6:30 PM (before that was two hours of live BBC and CNN the rest of the day). There used to be a 30 minute cartoon, a 30 minute sitcom, a 1 hour English Series, then the Khabarnama (state repression?? They played the Khabarnama at 10 initially as a test project and found out that 1% people tuned in!!), followed by either an English or a Old (50s, 60s, 70s) Pakistani movie.
The biggest thing that I remember about BBC and CNN was the censorship, when they used to turn the screen into mosaic when something objectionable used to come on the screen. Getting through this censorship was a hot topic !!. The decoding worked in the initial stages of this transmission. You didn’t even need a wet cloth. All you needed was semi-transparent piece of cloth and sometimes you had to move it a little. I personally experienced this :D. Anyway, this ended up soon and the new scheme could not be deciphered. At least not to my knowledge!
*Source: *Pakistan Popular Culture History