Search the Internet          Tips  Sites: Finance, Investment

WorldSpace to add 10 radio channels aimed at India

WorldSpace Corp, which beams 25 round-the-clock radio channels directly by satellite to compatible radio receivers across the world, said on Thursday that it planned to add 10 more channels aimed at India.

The Washington-based privately held company currently beams seven channels towards the Indian market. The other channels, which cover everything from contemporary music to news channels like CNN, are mainly targeted towards the rest of Asia and Africa.

"We plan to increase the number of channels from 25 at present to around 35 by March 2002 targeting additional channels at our audience in India," Noah Samara, WorldSpace's founder and chairman, told a news conference in Bangalore.

Samara also launched a WorldSpace receiver set, combined with a cassette player and AM and FM radio, made by India's BPL Ltd.

WorldSpace, which currently has three satellites, eventually plans to cover about 5.2 billion people worldwide. The firm, which licences receiver technology, also runs 10 of its own channels and arranges the rest from partners.

The company was founded in 1990 but started beaming a commercial service in 1999 for Africa.

For Samara, a US-based, Ethiopian-born lawyer, the venture combines business ambitions with a desire to take educational content and information on issues like AIDS awareness to the developing world.

"To a large extent, the vision of WorldSpace is to create information affluence," Samara said.

However, the venture also had a strong commercial plan and intended to go public in the future, Samara told Reuters.

Samara said the developing world alone had 150 million radio receivers being replaced or bought anew every year and usually covered only two channels. WorldSpace would offer a wide choice as it built up content and spread its business, he said.

Using digital technologies, WorldSpace also has plans to launch downloading of multimedia content like Internet sites directly into remotely located personal computers through satellite radio receivers.

Tell us what you think of this report