Radyne ComStream, through its wholly-owned subsidiary Armer Communications Engineering Services (ACES), has bagged a contract worth $1.1 million with leading sports broadcaster ESPN Star Sports. This is to support a digital television uplink facility in Singapore.

Bob Fitting, CEO Radyne ComStream said: "This project demonstrates our continued success in providing professional turnkey solutions for the video broadcast industry while adding Radyne ComStream equipment content."

Radyne ComStream designs, manufactures and markets satellite Internet-infrastructure equipment, satellite broadband modems, multicasting receivers, and ancillary products for digital TV, data and telephone service. Through the Tiernan subsidiary the company supplies HDTV and SDTV encoding and transmission equipment.

The Ramoji Rao owned Eenadu Television Network is all set to launch six new regional language channels next month. Interestingly, each of these will speak a different dialect. There are separate channels for Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Rajasthan, apart from channels in Oriya and Gujarati.

The network already has Telugu, Bangla, Marathi, Kannada and Urdu channels in its kitty. ETV Telugu was launched in 1995, followed by ETV Bangla in May 2000, ETV Marathi in June and ETV Kannada in December. The Urdu channel was launched as a 24-hour free-to-air digital channel on 15 August this year for which programming content had been built up for more than one and a half years.

ETV publicity head A Vishwambar Rao says the same meticulous preparation has gone into the building of programming software for the six channels that are to be launched next month. The new channels will follow a similar programming pattern as the existing ones. This entails a fair mix of entertainment and information with hourly news updates, telefilms, family dramas, daily soaps, devotional and musical programmes.

Most of the network?s programmes are produced in house, at the state of the art Ramoji Rao Studios in Hyderabad. Programming for the four ?Hindi-belt? channels - ETV-MP, ETV-UP, ETV-Bihar and ETV-Rajasthan - has been organised in such a way that all four will air the same shows in the prime time band. The channels will have their own programming for the rest of the slots, according to Rao.