Americom Asia-Pacific (AAP) last week announced the appointment of Elias B. Zaccack as Managing Director, based in Singapore, replacing Cynthia Dickins. Dickins who had been the face of Americom Asia for quite sometime now will be shifting to Bethseda, Maryland, USA following her promotion as Vice President, International Sales for GE Americom. Zaccack was earlier regional sales manager Asia PAcific for Scientific Atlanta.
AAP is a joint venture between GE American Communications (GE Americom), based in Princeton, NJ, and Lockheed Martin Global Telecommunications (LMGT), headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland. AAP‘s GE-1A, a Ku-band satellite will be launched and fully operational by the end of 2000. AAP currently has offices in Singapore, New Delhi, and Beijing.

Channel V has adapted a new strategy to lead the market (or is it for survival?). The earlier confused channel will now refocus itself and concentrate on more businesess including the Internet, radio and merchandising. The channel will make a foray in the radio arena through FM radio. It has not ruled out Internet radio as another platform.
The emptying coffers of the channel has forced it to restructure its activities and adapt an agressive marketing approach to lure advertisors. It has drawn a three-point revenue plan - "e-commerce, merchandising and syndication".

The channel will enter the merchandising business and is in talks with distributors for the same. It is in the process of designing ad campaigns for this business stream. The rival channel MTV has already finalised its merchandising plans.

[V] will not ignore the WWW. It‘s website www.vindia.com recently won the "Best Indian Website of the Year" award at the Abby 2000 awards ceremony. Abby 2000 is hosted by the Advertisers‘ Club of Mumbai. The youth channel will acquire portals and enter the broadband arena. It plans to an create online youth channel. It will also webcast tailor-made programmes specially for the Internet.

We just can‘t say another one bites the dust, for the new channel Sabe TV which belongs to Shri Adhikari Brothers Television Network which has been a household name for the television viewers for quite a long time. And it comes as no surprise that the production house decided to launch their own channel after producing more that 35 sitcoms for various channels. The brothers had a official launch meet for the announce the launch of their Rs 1.25 billion channel, Sabe TV, in their home town Ahmedabad.
The Shri Adhikari Brothers name tag will definitely be easy to sell considering the production house has churned our hits after hits on various channels and in many languages and has been doing it consistently for a long period of time. The launch of the channel, which will be beamed off the Asiasat-3, was also done in a very unique manner. The brothers roped in the lissome Karishma Kapoor, who announced in the launch party "Jab Dekho Sabe Dekho", to hand over goodies to cable operators, a strategy obviously intended at improving its relationship with the cable operators.

As far as the channels programming is concerned there is no doubt that the channel will definitely get some big hits for their own channel in the same way that they did for others. The channel has also roped in high profile producers like Sachin and Ravi Rai for production of popular serials.

Also the channel, to set itself apart from the rest of the channels, has announced that it will not have any films on air. Instead the channel is focusing exclusively on up to 30 original programmes from all genres. Sabe will also air few popular Shri Adhikari Brothers serials which are aired on other channels.

The Securuties and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) has finally given the much awaited green signal to media, entertainment and telecom companies who had been demanding since a long time the 10 per cent Initial Public Offering (IPO) norm which was earlier enjoyed only by Infotech companies.
The board meeting held by Sebi decided on allowing knowledge based companies in the media, entertainment and telecom sector to offer a minimum 10 per cent shares to the public through IPOs. Earlier to this, the norm was a minimum 25 per cent IPO.

One condition, however, is added which says that minimum 2 million shares should be issued and the size of the public offering should be atleast Rs 500 million. This norm is to ensure enough floating stock in the market. Also 75 per cent revenues and profit of such companies should come from one of media, entertainment or telecom businessess.

MTV India has announced a new Director Communications. The former Good Relations (India) employee Charlotte Lester has replaced Hemant Kenkre. Charlotte will report directly to the MTV India Managing Director Alex Kuruvilla.
Hemant Kenkre has left the channel to pursue his cricketing passion and has joined the cricketing portal www.cricketnext.com as CEO.

The Bangalore based Technology Media Group Ltd (TMG) has launched a 24 hour technology channel "TMG Enter". The free-to-air channel is uplinked from India and is beamed from Intelsat 703 on the analog mode. The channel has got its birth from an infotech programme "Infotrek" on DD Metro.
TMG aims at creating a world-class knowledge repository on technology to redefine the way it is delivered. It also aims to provide services in languages other than English and emerge as a leader in the South-East Asian market.

It also has launched a magazine "CIO" and an Infotech portal www.indiaitonline.com. The company is under the process of recruiting managerial and technical staff for the television channel, magazine and portal.

The channel, being the first of its kind, is expected to perform well in India due the IT boom and the quality programming it owns.