Sony Entertainment Television will launch its Hindi entertainment channel in Africa and Australia in October to take on rival network Zee TV. Sony TV has tied up with the Australian Direct-to-home (DTH) service provider Optus and will be on Aurora B Five satellite. It will pay an uplinking fee of $450,000 to Optus for beaming the signals, a source close to the company said. The footprint will cover Australia and New Zealand but not include Fiji. The prices are yet to be fixed. "We will launch Sony TV in Australia by mid-October. We are working out on the price," said Sony Entertainment Television chief operating officer Mr Rajesh Pant. Sony is eyeing the 100,000 ethnic Indians living in Australia. Cable and Wireless owns Optus which carries several ethnic channels. Foxtel is the rival DTH provider with 50 channels but has no ethnic channel on its platform.Sony has tied up with DTH service provider Multi Choice and will launch its channel in Africa on October 2. The channel will be priced along with Zee TV and B4U, Mr Pant said.
Sony TV, which was off air in the US after the Ethnic American Broadcasting Corporation went bust, has started its broadcast on EchoStar through the DISH Network this month. The channel is being offered complimentary to all Echostar subscribers for the month of September to introduce the US audience to Sony Entertainment's programming lineup. A special pricing package, however, has been worked out and will be available to customers in October.
Sony, TV Asia and Zee TV will be priced together at $35 per subscriber. A package of four channels will cost $45 while five channels are priced at $55 per subscriber. B4U and Zee Gold are the other two channels. Sony TV is offered as the third basic premium channels as well as Zee Gold and B4U as buy-through channels.
"We do not have a stand-alone price for the channel. We expect to have 50,000 subscribers. Earlier, we had 22,000 customers," said Mr Pant. DISH Network is EchoStar's state-of-the-art DBS system with the capacity to offer customers 500 channels of digital video and CD-quality audio programming as well as fully MPEG-2/DVB compliant hardware and installation. It currently serves 4.3 million customers.
In Europe, Sony has tied up with Telenor, the Scandinavian-based DTH company. "We will have a pricing similar to the UK market," said Mr Pant.
Sony has 73,000 subscribers in the UK. The stand-alone price for the channel is 9.99 Pounds while the packaged price with B4U is 12.99 Pounds. "While DTH customers account for 60 per cent, the balance 40 per cent are cable subscribers," added Mr Pant.
Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.