CANNES: India is rapidly becoming one of the world's media powerhouses, making leaders of the global entertainment business attending last week's MIPCOM audiovisual trade show sit up and take notice.

"The media companies in India have readied themselves, they are now powerful and I think that they are ready to take on the world," Paul Johnson, television director for the show's organizer Reed MIDEM, told a press conference in this southern French city.This year's MIPCOM gave a special focus to the Indian media industry.

When South Korea was MIPCOM's country of honor a few years ago, the exposure propelled the country from "more or less oblivion on the international audiovisual market to becoming a very strong top ten country," Johnson noted."We think that India will be one of the top three entertainment countries in the world in the coming years," he emphasized.

The country's promising future is helped, like China, by its huge and extremely youthful population. With 54 per cent of the country's 1.1- billion people aged under 25, India is one of the world's potentially largest markets for TV.A total 71 million homes already have television, and 61 percent of them have pay TV.

At the weeklong show, India showed how it is leveraging its rich film culture to create exciting new content for the emerging IPTV (Internet Protocol TV), web and mobile TV platforms both inside and outside the country.Until now the world has an image of India as a country bathed in music and dance, Anurradha Prasad who heads up India's BAG Films & Media Ltd, told a conference.