Pyramid Saimira enters partnership with Spize TV

Mumbai, Mar 14 (UNI) Pyramid Saimira Entertainment, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Pyramid Saimira Theatre has entered into a strategic partnership for content agglomeration, new channels and services launching with Spize TV, a Direct To Home Platform as part of its European footprint expansion programme.

An associate company of the group had earlier picked up a stake in Spize TV.

Commenting on the partnership Pyramid MD P S Saminathan said, the tie-up was another ''giant baby step'' for Pyramid's global entertainment strategy. ''With this, we are now creating last mile access which will synergise and will also leverage our content significantly. This also sets us well on the way to our European expansion strategy. Personally, for me this is a re-entry into cable and satellite space and this will be a start of an exciting journey in this space,'' he added.

Spize TV is a pan-European direct-to-home (DTH) TV platform offering Asian and niche content to viewers in Europe. Spize TV is available on the Euro Bird-9 (EB9) satellite, which allows viewers to benefit from the 500 plus free-to-air channels on the Hot Bird satellite by a simple dual-LNB upgrade. The technical details of Spize TV platform are EB9 at 9 degree East, 11,843 V, Txp 56, Symbol 27,500 and three forth FEC.

Spize TV will have a ''North'' (Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Bangla and Gujarati other languages) bouquet and a ''South'' bouquet (Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, and Singhalese, and Malay). It would also have Chinese and Spanish Bouquet, shortly.

Spize TV also announced the start of the platform with the complete suite of the ARY Network channels (ARY Digital, ARY One World, 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), and others being added.

Since the soft launch of the bouquet, the channels are available, and the formal full scale commercial launch for viewers would be between April and May.

The Hot Bird platform is available to over 130 million house holds that is 23 million in North Africa and West Asia, 30 million in Central and Eastern Europe, 77 million in Western Europe. Spize TV has planned to target the 30 million strong European ''niche and expat'' viewers across the region.

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