For starters, Star India is not. "I don't think that we would like to be part of Zee's HITS platform and give our channels," Star India CEO Peter Mukerjea told indiantelevision.com.

According to Mukerjea, who spends more time in meetings and traveling between Mumbai and Delhi these days, it does not make sense for Star to give access to its encrypted channels and the codes to Zee for turnaround from a central facility of Zee. "We also have interests in an MSO (Hathway, in which Star India holds 26 per cent of equity stake) and we might as well concentrate on that for distribution purposes," he added.

While Star India has made its stand more or less clear, Sony Entertainment TV India was not available for comment.

When contacted, a senior executive of Siti Cable, through which Zee is implementing its HITS project under the Galaxzee brand name, said, "Well, some informal talks had been initiated with other broadcasters, but all this needs to be followed up. However, no other broadcaster has said an outright no to us formally."

Zee is aggressively pushing its HITS project and the wooing of cable ops has already started. Recently, a bunch of cable ops were also given a guided tour of Zee's state-of-the-art facility at NOIDA, on the outskirts of Delhi, which would be used for HITS and the proposed KU-band DTH service.

Zee is also looking at throwing in additional services, like 12 satellite radio channels, for its HITS and DTH subscribers.