By IANS,
Kolkata : TV Southasia has become the first Indian current affairs television channel to be beamed directly to Pakistani homes, a company official said here Tuesday.
“The broadcast started in Karachi Monday evening and around midnight in the rest of Pakistan,” Rathikant Basu, one of the promoters of TV Southasia, told IANS.
TV Southasia, which has an Indian arm Tara Newz, would provide news content from India to three countries – Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh – through collations with leading channels in each of the countries.
“AAJ TV, the Pakistan arm of TV Southasia, will supply the content from Pakistan and also produce programmes,” he said.
Asked whether the venture could face problems due to the frosty nature of relations between India and Pakistan, Basu said: “I don’t think so. We won’t get into issues between governments. We won’t editorialise”.
The channel will be distributed through cable networks.
At the initiative of Tara Newz, a group of activists and broadcasters met in Kolkata and decided to form Southasian on Dec 2 and Dec 3, 2006, on the eve of the 14th SAARC Summit in New Delhi.