Star's Kannada offering, Suvarna, will be launching a new laughter show, Maja with Sruja, on 3 October.

The show's anchor Srujan who has built a name for himself by anchoring some shows on Suvarana channel such as a dance reality show 'Superstar of Karnataka', will look at happenings in a humorous way to have the viewers laughing throughout the one event every Sunday at 9.30 pm. He also performed during the finale of the all day airing of the reality show 'Pyate Hudugyaru, Halli Lifu', anchored by Sandalwood actor Sudesh.

ATN has acquired the Canadian distribution rights to cricket matches played in India from Neo Cricket. Armed with these rights, the Canadian broadcaster has announced the launch of a cricket television channel in Canada, ATN-Neo Cricket.

ATN president and CEO Dr. Shan Chandrasekar says, "The sun never sets on the commonwealth of cricket and ATN would like to bring first rate cricket shown on India's number one Neo Cricket Sports Channel to our viewers who extend beyond the commonwealth diasporas now settled in Canada and include all the cricket devotees from all walks of life.

Star's Tamil GEC offering Vijay TV has fine tuned its programming mix and begun refocusing on the fiction space by bringing in a medley of drama, thrillers and mythological series in a bid to build primetime viewership during the 6.30 to 9 pm time band. The channel is targeting women and family audiences in the Tamil space.

The weekday primetime now consists of 5 fiction shows that occupy the 6.30-9 pm block on prime time, thus creating a healthy mix of fiction and nonfiction shows.

In a move that could help overcome bandwidth crunch and reduce operational costs, Direct-to-Home (DTH) companies Sun Direct and Reliance Big TV have started sharing their back-end infrastructure such as transponders to jointly beam the free-to-air (FTA) channels.

Both Sun Direct and Reliance Big are co-located on Measat 3 of the Malaysian satellite operator. The tie-up should help them reduce costs as the annual leasing charges for a transponder ranges is Rs 5-7 crore and a DTH firm can beam up to 30 channels from each transponder.