Building on its successes over the past year in Australia and the Philippines, Turner Networks Asia (TNA) is gearing up to make a splash in the Indian market by merchandising and franchising popular characters from Cartoon Network.

The Power Puff Girls - a popular toon series featuring three little girls on Cartoon Network - will kick off the act with a music CD and toys based on the same characters. For the music CD local Indian singing acts will be roped in along with performances by US performers. "The Power Puff Girls have very positive associations as focus groups have shown us they are seen as super heroes and are trying to position them for women of all ages," says vice-president TNA, Off Channel Commerce Group, Levina Li. "The 20-somethings will form the peak of our pyramid while the mass will come from our core audience of four to 14-year-olds."

TNA has already made forays into Australia (a year ago) and the Philippines and next on the list is India, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and Thailand.

Crown Media Holdings on Wednesday announced the formation of Crown Interactive, a new division of the company designed to leverage the wide array of products and services from Crown Media‘s affiliated companies, Hallmark Cards and Hallmark Entertainment, in the burgeoning interactive television marketplace.

Crown Interactive has formally begun its beta testing stage in Singapore, offering video-on-demand (VOD) on a non-exclusive basis in conjunction with Sharkstream, a streaming portal specialising in interactive multimedia entertainment for the Asia Pacific region. Sharkstream is a subsidiary of Indian media company United Television (UTV).

Consumers throughout Singapore can now view full screen streaming video of some of the best titles from the Hallmark Entertainment library, including, "Gulliver‘s Travels", "Merlin", "Cleopatra", "Jason and the Argonauts" and "Arabian Nights". Other cutting-edge interactive services and capabilities including video greetings and e-commerce should be added to the Singapore platform during its beta phase period with a full roll out of Crown Interactive in the region scheduled to begin during the second quarter of 2001, according to a press release.

By leveraging Hallmark‘s readily available, cross-divisional assets, including technology, creative resources, infrastructure, content and professional relationships worldwide, the Crown Interactive platform will become a comprehensive, user-friendly broadband service for consumers and platform operators, available through both PC-based systems and digital set-top boxes.

The Ninth Convergence India 2001 international exhibition and conference is being organised by Exhibitions India from 21-23 March at the Pragati Maidan in New Delhi.

The three-day event will attempt to link broadband options in the digital marketplace with cutting edge technologies in the field of broadband networking infrastructure and services highlighting communications, high-speed digital network for the distribution of digital entertainment, interactive services, and multimedia communications.

The exhibition is expected to attract 400 exhibitors from 20 countries. According to a press release issued by Exhibitions India, Convergence India 2001 will also highlight futuristic technologies to project "convergence" as an empowering tool for IT, broadcasting and telecommunications.