STAR 7827 to create magic on mobile screen

New Delhi, May 24 (UNI) 'Kaun Banega Crorepati-2' had set a new record in interactivity -- audience participation -- by receiving 130 million text messages and calls across 61 episodes.

Targeting India's burgeoning mobile entertainment market, leading media company STAR India has now announced a slew of initiatives to enhance its STAR 7827 platform offering by expanding its services from TV-focused interactivity to entertainment, especially created for the mobile screen.

STAR 7827 (which stands for STAR on your handset keypad) is the short code of STAR which was initially set up to enhance channel and viewer interactivity by offering instant involvement in shows and contests across the STAR bouquet of channels.

''The proposed initiatives are set to revolutionise the mobile entertainment market by bringing in an innovative, diverse mix of programming and high quality content that will appeal to users across India,'' Star Entertainment, India CEO Sameer Nair said.

STAR 7827, in its new avatar, will be creating, distributing and marketing content through tie-ups with Indian and International companies to eventually provide the largest collection of cutting edge mobile content.

The STAR 7827 website -- www.star7827.com -- has been completely redesigned to reflect this new push in content aggregation. A special section to help visitors learn more about their phones, talk about mobile content and services as exchange views and experiences has also been created.

A WAP site for mobile internet users has also been created from where visitors will soon be able to access an exciting range of mobile contents, including videos.

''STAR 7827 will be one of the key focus areas of our business and is expected to contribute significantly to our revenues over the next 3 to 5 years, Mr Nair said, adding: ''Our proven programming and marketing abilities should ensure that we become one of the key players in this space.'' Apart from its exclusive content from the STAR bouquet, STAR 7827 has also aggregated licensed content to offer popular mobile services like exclusive ringtones, astrology predictions from Bejan Daruwalla, jokes and other exclusive mobile games like Super Simpoo.

Highlighting the synergies between mobile and TV business, Viren Popli, Senior Vice President of STAR Interactive, STAR India, said, ''We have put together an offering that synergises our programming strength with global learnings of entertainment 'on the go'. The content will be continuously refreshed so as to create stickiness with the consumer.'' As part of its market strategy, STAR 7827 will also launch a series of TV campaigns which revolves around a quirky South Indian character "Muthuswamy", played by the popular South Indian star Chinni Jayanth.

STAR 7827 has several firsts to its credit, including the first reverse auction, the first play along, the first text2tv show as well as the first mobisode in the Indian market.

www.star7827.com and www.wap.star7827.com are the respective internet and wap destination of the service.

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