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BANGALORE:
One more TV channel has entered the Kannada market as of this
morning. Kasthuri Media’s (KMPL) Kannada channel Kasthuri,
promoted by the family of Karnataka state chief minister HD
Kumaraswamy, officially began beaming today.
With
this, the total number of private GEC and movie channels available
to the Kannadiga has risen to seven – the other players
being three from the Sun group, and one each from Asianet,
Zee and ETV. The number of channels from private broadcasters
from Karnataka has increased to 11 – two more channels
by the Sun group (news and a youth channel) and two news channels
– TV9 Kannada and a channel focused on real estate –
Real Estate TV - which started test signal this month.
As
reported earlier, TV9 has already announced a that it has
plans to launch two Kannada channels some time next year -a
movie and entertainment channel and a religious channel.
According
to KMPL COO Balaajee, the channel is being carried by all
the six major MSO’s in Karnataka, including sister concern
Amogh Broadband Services (Amogh), which controls over 40 per
cent of the cable operations in the outskirts of Bangalore
and 50 per cent in the rest of Karnataka. KMPL distribution
is focused on Karnataka in the first stage, according to company
sources.
At
present the channel has only local advertisers. “We will
attract national level advertisers soon. I am competing with
six GEC and movie channels here and we plan to take them head
on,” said Balaajee while speaking with Indiantelevision.com.
The
channel has seven in-house produced soaps, one daily game
show and one bi-weekly game show on air, according to company
sources. Production of the game shows has been outsourced.
A lot of the programming will be women oriented, besides which
the channel has rights to about 125 Kannada movies, informs
Balaajee.
Kasthuri,
a 24-hour FTA channel, will be broadcast through Insat 4A’s
‘C’ band transponder. The channel is not currently
available on the DTH platform. The chief minister’s wife
Ainta Kumaraswamy is the managing director of KMPL and Amogh.
Also
Read:
Real
Estate TV to start test signals from 1 September
TV9
to launch two Kannada channels
Asianet
to launch Kannada GEC ‘Suvarna’ by mid June
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