Dish TV preparing for Sri Lanka launch

Dish TV India is to launch services in Sri Lanka soon in a joint venture formed with Satnet. The joint venture company Dish TV Lanka  is 70% owned by Dish TV & 30% owned by Satnet and makes use of Satnet's DTH license.

Dish TV which planned to invest Rupees 700 million initially has approved a further Rupees 300 million for its Sri Lankan operations.

Dish TV plans to use Conax as it's encryption provider (the same used by Dish TV India), and the same set-top box suppliers who supply the Indian market. Dish TV will use a dedicated transponder on "SES" satellite.

It's unclear as to when Dish TV will build their own satellite up-linking station in Sri Lanka, however unconfirmed reports say that the up-linking station is already complete.

Its not clear as to the content that Dish TV will make available. Will they allow Asian feeds of popular channels such as HBO, AXN, etc or will they stick solely to the ad infested Indian feeds? Will they give preference to Tamil & Hindi channels over English channels? Will they include local channels? A lot of questions remain, however the competition is most welcome in a market where there is not much movement with one sole DTH company dominating and swapping and replacing channels as they wish and the only IPTV provider doing nothing to improve service quality or add new channels.

It's quite clear that the local operators will react to this development, for them to face the stiff competition posed by Dish TV, they should start now instead of adopting a wait and see attitude.

Source "Television Post": Dish TV readying to launch in Sri Lanka soon via JV company

You TV starts programming little by little

A couple of days ago we noticed that You TV (formerly Max TV) which rebranded a couple of months back but stuck solely to broadcasting only France 24, is now slowly introducing other programming content. However the other programming that are being introduced are still the same ones that existed during the time Max TV brand existed. Nothing much has changed, at the moment "Masterchef" is on air, political programme "4th Floor" is available.

We are still unsure if other programming such as movies, music programming and wrestling which was available under the Max brand have also returned but if not, it should likely do so over the coming weeks.

We hope that for the sake of viewers and for all the teasers that were run over the period of the test transmission, some fresh programming will be available to viewers in due course.

Videocon & Dish TV to launch in Sri Lanka soon

Unconfirmed reports coming to us are indicating that Videocon & Dish TV will be launching in Sri Lanka in the very near future. The operators are said to be looking at the possibility of setting up an earth station and uplinking from Sri Lankan soil.

We are unable to confirm these reports, however there were indications back in 2012 of Dish TV expressing an interest to launch services officially in Sri Lanka.

Videocon on the other hand has been the latest entry into the Indian DTH market and has approximately about 10 million subscribers & has the most number of HD channels on offer compared to the other operators.

If this turns out to be true, these two companies will pose a great challenge & increase competition in the rather stagnant pay television market in Sri Lanka.

CSN showcases RBS 6 Nations

After a string of days with no clear broadcaster for RBS 6 Nations over FTA in Sri Lanka, it is pleasing to note that CSN carried the matches "LIVE" for Sri Lankan FTA audiences. The broadcast which was pulled off the special feed provided by "Setanta Sports" for their partners in Sri Lanka which was run without the "Setanta" logo on all platforms.

It is clear that over the two (three if Channel Eye is also taken into consideration) sports channels in Sri Lanka, CSN seems to be the one thats coming out on top. This is not considering cricketing content.

With RBS 6 Nations seemingly to come on CSN over the next few weeks, its yet to be seen if the Winter Olympics are broadcast over local airwaves. With Russia being the host, it seems that it will be & hopefully won't be exclusive to any channel, since there are many simultaneous events. A combination of channels such as Channel Eye, NTV, MTV sports, CSN would do a better job.