No sob stories on this Tamil pay channel!

Our eFE Bureau in Chennai

Chennai-based Diksaat Transworld Ltd will shortly launch ‘Win TV’-a 24-hour Tamil channel that promises ‘sweeping laughter among weeping channels...’. The satellite TV channel devoted exclusively to humour will be test launched on January 13 and will begin commercial telecast from January 27. It is the first Tamil channel to go pay and perhaps the first in the country to do so from day one.

The channel is currently doing all the programming in-house and plans to outsource content after six months, by when it expects to establish the image it wants to project. It so far has around 700 hours of programming, which is enough to sustain the channel for 13 weeks, said Mr T Dhevanathan, chairman and managing director of Win TV. From April 14, 2002, the channel plans to premiere a new Tamil film every Sunday, he told a media gathering in Chennai. The channel is currently in the process of entering into an agreement for this with the Tamil film producers’ council, he said.

The new films will be mainly a mixture of small and medium-budget films. The channel is also looking at financing such films and is not averse to considering big budget films too.

Started with an initial fund of Rs 18 crore, the TV company expects to break-even in a year’s time. It has so far spent Rs 8 crore and expects the rest to last 10 to 12 months.

The company is building its own studio with state-of-the-art infrastructure at an investment of Rs 3.5 crore. It is expected to be ready by April. For the time being it has leased a studio to produce its programmes.

The TV channel is planning to charge Rs 10 per household as subscription fee. It is tying-up with 30 distributors across the state and other areas where Tamil channels have viewership. Each of these distributors will bring in 60 cable operators into their network.