(14 March 2008 4:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Chennai-based Saimira Access Technologies, a privately held company floated by Pyramid Saimira Theatre Ltd. MD PS Saminathan, has acquired 51 per cent stake in Spize TV, a pan-European direct-to-home (DTH) TV platform offering Asian and niche content.

The focus will be to cater to viewers in UK, Europe and the Middle East.

"Saimira Access Technologies has picked up 51 per cent in Spize TV," Saminathan tells Indiantelevision.com.

In a related deal, Pyramid Saimira Entertainment Ltd (PSEL), a subsidiary of Pyramid Saimira Theatre, has entered into a strategic partnership for content agglomeration, new channels and services with the European DTH platform.

"PSEL is having a content deal with Spize TV. It will not only do deals with broadcasters for the DTH platform but also produce content," says Saminathan.

Spize TV is available on the EuroBird-9 (EB9) satellite. It will have Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Bangla and Gujarati bouquets, a South bouquet of Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, and Singhalese and Malay. "It will also have Chinese amd Spanish Bouquet shortly," says Saminathan.

Spize TV has also announced the start of the platform with the complete suite of the Ary Network channels (Ary Digital, Ary OneWorld, QTV, and The Musik) and also the two B4U Network channels (B4U Movies and B4U Music) in its North bouquet. Other channels will be added in due course.

The "South" bouquet currently has DAN (Tamil) and TV Lanka (Sinhalese).

"We have done a soft launch of the bouquet. The formal full scale commercial launch for viewers will be in April-May 2008," says Saminathan.

Spize TV will have both Viaccess and Irdeto conditional access systems to allow both bouquets to watch a mix of channels including live international cricket matches played in India and Pakistan.

SpizeTV will be arranging the installation of "dual-LNBs" on the existing viewers' of HotBird dishes to allow them to continue watching their other favourite channels on the HotBird satellite, as well as a large bouquet of channels on SpizeTV on the EB9 satellite.