NEWSX AND dishtv have signed an agreement, which will ensure that all subscribers on India’s largest digital platform will receive India’s first HDTV-ready premier news channel in English, starting Monday, April 14, 2008.

 
Jawahar Goel, managing director, dishtv and additional vice-chairman, Essel Group, said, “It gives us extreme pleasure to announce this coveted alliance. As India’s number one direct-to-home service provider, dishtv has always been leading from the front and providing the best in entertainment to its subscribers. With the addition of NewX, dishtv has further enhanced its content basket that stands strengthened to an unmatched 185 channels, by far the largest in the industry today. All major new channels in English, Hindi and even regional languages are available to the dishtv subscriber base, which currently stands over three million and is growing at a fast pace of nearly a lakh new subscriber per month.”
 
Indrani Mukerjea, chairperson, INX News, said, “NewsX aims to provide viewers in India and overseas with a world-class product, which is analytical in-depth and unbiased, striving to deliver ‘clarity in a complex world’.  We are confident that the discerning viewers of dishtv will respond well to NewsX.”
 
Significantly, NewsX, which was launched in cable households across India on March 27, will become available on the digital mode on dishtv from April 14.  With this, the channel will reach additional three million-plus homes of dishtv users, who are quality conscious and discerning in their choice of entertainment.  
 
Arup Ghosh, head of newsroom, NewsX, said, “NewsX goes beyond the ordinary and obvious, offering a choice with focused, intelligent programming to people who appreciate quality and demand well researched and thought-provoking news. I am confident it will be well received by the discerning and quality-conscious DTH subscribers nationwide.”
 
NewsX is India’s only 24-hour news channel, which will provide HDTV-ready pictures from each of their 14 bureaus across India, and aims to provide world class news content to viewers in India as well as Indians living overseas. It is also the first news channel in the Asia Pacific region to use high definition cameras on the road, offering better-looking footage with sharper image quality. MPEG-4 (instead of the conventional MPEG-2) encoding gets the picture directly to the viewer at the highest speed in the shortest time.
 
The entire facility is designed and constructed to lead the way in the HD news production in India.