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MUMBAI:
With a lot of live sports content at its disposal, Star India
is gearing up to launch a new sports channel under the Star
Sports brand on 11 March.
Christened
Star Sports 2, the channel will have international football
as its driver content. It will also show other sports content.
Star
has the broadcast rights to football properties like English
Premier League, Spanish league La Liga and Italian league
Serie A for India besides FA Cup rights.
"Yes,
we are launching a new sports channel on 11 March. Star Sports
2 will primarily have international football content besides
other sports content," Star India COO Sanjay Gupta tells
Indiantelevision.com.
The
channel will be initially available on digital cable networks
and will be subsequently rolled out on analog cable networks
across the country.
Star
is launching the new channel to avoid overlapping of cricket
content with other sports content. The problem only accentuates
when India cricket is on as the broadcaster has a bi-lingual
feed in English and Hindi on Star Sports and Star Cricket.
It
will also help the broadcaster to streamline the scheduling
of its different properties.
"We
have a lot of sports content, so at times we are unable to
utilise this content when there are multiple events lined
up simultaneously," Gupta explains.
The
broadcaster has dedicated supply of cricket content throughout
the year as it holds the media rights for three cricket boards,
India, Australia and England, in addition to the ICC rights.
Besides cricket and football, Star also boasts of rights to
properties like Formula One, MotoGP, Wimbledon, Australian
Open in Tennis, and PGA Tour.
News
Corps, which had last year acquired ESPN's stake in joint
venture ESPN Star Sports (ESS) for $335 million, had restructured
its sports broadcasting business in Asia. While the India
business was brought under Star India, the rest of Asia business
came under Fox Star Sports Asia under Peter Hutton.
Subsequently,
the ESPN brand name was dropped across Asia except India where
Star is awaiting government clearance on the ESS acquisition
before taking a call on change of brand name.
"We
have still not decided what we will do with ESPN. We are considering
both Fox as well as Star brand name. However, a final call
is yet to be taken," Gupta discloses.
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