Star India's new channel 'Star World Premiere' to go on-air from Sept 24th

Beginning September 24th, Star India will launch its new channel called Star World Premiere in HD format. This will be the 41st channel from Star India’s stable and the first-of-its-kind channel in India it will air popular American shows, along with a handful of new ones, within 24 hours of their airing in the US; their tagline being ‘Watch with the World’Another plus is that Star India promises fewer ads as compared to other channels. This would be the fourth GEC offering from Star India’s stable after Star World, Fox Crime and FX.  The uniqueness lies in SWP being the only channel to air up-to-date content unlike any of the English GECs in India, today.

The channel will go live with 26 shows of which six are new shows.  As per the Twitter account of the channel, initial programming would be for 26 TV shows. These would include latest seasons of The Simpsons, New Girl, Revolution, Two & A Half Men, among others. New shows would include Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D, The Blacklist, Betrayal, Dads, The Goldbergs, The Michael J. Fox Show, Mom and Sleepy Hollow.

The channel will source content from Fox Studios, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers and Disney. The network targeting about one and a half million households having HD set-top boxes. With English viewing content nearly doubling in the last 3-4 years, all major broadcasters are focusing and strengthening their presence in this space. Digitisation will give a further boost to this group.

As for new channel, the company has not put out details of incremental investment and the cost of acquiring  new content which is expected to be at a premium. Likewise the break-even and the investment payback period is also not known