The bad news: for many it's time to bid goodbye to IPO dreams with the markets delivering a rude awakening. "Some of these companies will now have to look at options like short-term loans or in some cases may even have to shelve their plans," says Mr Chandir Gidwani, managing director, Centrum Finance, the lead manager for certain key media issues.

Pointing out that the impact of deferred IPO plans can be grim for companies, Mr Harish Thawani, CEO, Nimbus Communications says: "Ideally, we would like to hit the market in the next three months, or the following quarter at the latest, otherwise the launch of Shobiz TV will get adversely affected." Nimbus was looking at a Rs 134 crore IPO out of which Rs 48 crore is for the `Shobiz' television channel project.

The remaining funds raised by the issue were to go towards the company's business in sports, music and movie content. Other companies like UTV and Devgan Entertainment have also been continuously deferring their plans. UTV's IPO plans had been announced by company officials last year, but it still remains unclear when the company will finally go public. Devgan Entertainment's executive director, Kumar Mangat says that the market today is hardly favourable for his company's IPO and admits that Devgan Entertainment has had to rework its strategy in keeping with the current market reality. "We have already made changes in our plans and we will decide on the IPO only towards the end of this year," he says. On his company's IPO, Mr Ravi Gupta, CEO, B4U Multimedia, says: "We are still not ready with our plans and have not decided when we will be going public."

B4U had announced plans of an IPO almost a year ago. While Mr Gupta says that the prevailing market situation has not affected his company's plans to go public, the company still shows no signs of an IPO in the immediate future.

The company had announced that the capital raised from the IPO would go towards the launch of five new channels.

"Companies like UTV and NDTV have raised private equity capital," says a media analyst with a foreign research firm. These companies have therefore managed to take care of their immediate funding. "Companies which have not managed to raise money through IPOs will run into problems," he adds. Clearly, so far there is little scope for a happy ending in this script.