The domain name has been registered by Media Arc Pvt Ltd, a Delhi-based company started by former BBC-journalist Raman Nanda and his team. Media Arc already provides audio clips on its news website -- www.media-arc.com.The site has 15-minute English bulletins and five-minute Hindi bulletins and detailed news and music clips.

However, with the new domain name being registered last week, the company is planning to shift all its audio programming to the new website within a month. There are plans of having a 24-hour service within a year.

Media Arc has a tie-up with the news agency UNI for its news service. Its team also includes Ajit Shahi, former executive producer of TV1.Media Arc's manager programming, Subir Sarbabidya, told The Financial Express, "we are using the streaming media format for theaudio clips where you can start hearing the clip while the file is being downloaded. A real time player called G2 has to be downloaded from a link provided on our site from real.com."

Normally, at music sites on the internet one has to wait for the entire file to download before it can be played.

Netscape and Real have already submitted draft papers on a proposed Real Time Streaming Protocol to the Internet Engineering Scientific Committee in the US. If the protocol is recognised, all web browsers will have to incorporate real time players too.

Media Arc is planning to organise two-and-a-half hours of programme in English, daily on the website plus another half an hour of programme in Hindi. There will be five-minute news headlines in English to be updated thrice a day and similar Hindi news clips to be updated twice a day.Sarbabidya said, "we also planning a daily South Asia news review audio clip on the website."

Ogilvy & Mather had been asked to prepare a study on the advertising revenue generatingpotential of the project. According to Sarbabidya, the projections are "mindboggling and the revenue generation potential is many times that of FM radio."

According to the site reports, around 37 per cent of the visitors accessing the audio clips on Media Arc's current website are from India and the rest are from out side the country. Most of the foreign traffic is from the UK and US.

Sarbabidya said, "to enjoy the audio clips one must have any multimedia ready Pentium-based PC with 16 MB RAM. Windows 98 has a real time player, in case the user is using Windows 95 he can download the player easily."Media Arc's website at present has music clips and reviews, film reviews and film video clips, as well as book reviews and the news in the text format. "There are plans for an online bookshop, music shop with home delivery service and a travel management service for foreigners visiting India," Sarbabidya said.

Marketing for the site is yet to start and will be started as soon as the new website is ready withthe programmes. "We will be looking out for ads targeting the NRI diaspora," Sarbabidya said.