No Al-Barakah T20 Canada Cup coverage in this region

No pay television channel nor any local channel will be carrying live coverage of the T20 Cup to be played in Canada commencing today.

The reasons for the lack of coverage is the timing of the matches since all of them are out local television viewing time range.

It is an utter shame on ESPN, Star Sports, Star Cricket, Ten Sports, Neo Sports, Neo Cricket & Zee Sports for not telecasting this tournament. It is even more shameful for Star Cricket & Neo Cricket since they call themselves cricket centric channels and cannot telecast a cricket tournament because of less advertising revenue. These are pay channels and they get revenue from audiences viewing the channel too and not only advertising revenue so they have to at least justify the income from the audiences.

Airtel Digital TV commences today. Is Sri Lanka next?

"Airtel Digital TV" the DTH pay television service of Airtel India will launch today across India. This is the 6th DTH service provider in India and broadcasts using the latest MPEG4 DVDs2 technology. Although the initial rollout is for Indian audiences only we believe that Airtel will launch their DTH service in Sri Lanka too once they launch their mobile phone service.

This will indeed be a threat to Sri Lankan pay television service providers since Airtel will not have to invest too much for their pay television service since the entire setup is available in India. They will only have to market and sell the connections with some sort of customer support.

Airtel DTH may dominate the Sri Lankan pay television market since most of our local pay television operators are much more expensive than their Indian counterparts.

Sony "Pix" to showcase FA cup

The Indian region broadcast rights for the 2008-2009 season of the FA cup has been secured by the english movie channel Set "Pix". This would mean that ESPN Star Sports will not be carrying the matches for audiences in Sri Lanka either.

Set "Pix" is not available over any Sri Lankan pay television providers but it is widely available over Indian DTH services.

Sri Lankan pay television networks namely Dialog TV, LBN & PEO TV should introduce Set Pix on their platform under a suitable low priced package immediately since the FA cup commences during the month of November or many football fans will miss the football action.

FM 104 radio channel now tesing on FM 104.5

The English Language Radio Channel that was testing on FM 104 has now moved to 104.5FM. The channel which is known as Radio One is expected to launch soon. This channel is also being advertised on TV2 which is also a television station which is being tested.

We are not sure on the exact format of this radio station but we will update this information once we receive it.

Lak FM launched today

Sri Lanka's latest Sinhala Language Radio Station "Lak FM" launched today on FM 92 for colombo. This station commenced test transmissions almost 3 months ago. The launch was delayed untill they could achieve islandwide coverage status. Now since the station has obtained the desired coverage the station has now launched.

A few more radio channels are still in the pipeline and we could see them launch over the next few months.