XM launching South Asian channel
Tuesday, September 18, 2007 at 10:42 AM
Tags: 2, XM
XM Satellite Radio and the Asian Television Network (ATN) have partnered up to create a channel dedicated to the South Asian community: "ATN-Asian Radio."
ATN-Asian Radio (ch 159) will launch in October, providing both the U.S. and Canada with news, sports, music and entertainment for the South Asian community. ATN currently operates 14 television channels in Canada.
The channel will also offer live cricket commentary from ATN, Canada's largest distributor of World Class Cricket.
The programming on XM's ATN-Asian Radio will also include a range of music, from the best of Bollywood to popular South Asian artists. The channel will also broadcast Hindustani classical and carnatic music and will feature pop, folk, chutney and re-mixes.
While the majority of the channel's talk programming will be in English, there will be a substantial amount of content broadcast in South Asian languages such as Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi and Sinhalese, among others.
I don't doubt that this will generate interest in the South Asian community (folks with origins in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc), but can we please get a Technology-centric channel? Please? Leo Laporte is great and all, but geeks need some love too. Then again, I doubt catering to techie-types will do much in catering to serving the public interest.
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Comments
Great, so now we start to see what this merger has wrought. Wasted bandwidth on bullshit channels to make loud minority groups happy.
Posted by: pfreak | September 18, 2007 11:09 AM
Right on! Initially I was looking forward to the merger. Not so much anymore. I hope it doesn’t go through … unless Primosphere is allowed to go into the satellite radio business!
Posted by: The Captian | September 18, 2007 11:20 AM
Sounds like an XM Cancon channel, from the people that brought you Laugh Attack and The Verge
Posted by: Travis | September 18, 2007 11:27 AM
I think listening to cricket will be interesting
Posted by: Hello Exactly | September 18, 2007 12:06 PM
This is soooo Awesome. With us South Asain polulation growing day by day XM made a smart move. They will get millions of subscribers becasue of this.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward | September 18, 2007 12:08 PM
Great news!! After getting all these latin music channels it is indeed more than welcome
Posted by: Dhiren | September 18, 2007 12:22 PM
And um... there's STILL no GLBT channel for us gay people? Oh yeah. Online. Thanks, XM!
Posted by: Timbrat | September 18, 2007 12:22 PM
Cool. I liked the music on Radio Taj before it got axed. I always loved leaving one of the really obscure world channels on pretty loud when I drop the car off at Jiffy Lube.
Posted by: TVGenius | September 18, 2007 1:06 PM
What happened to the proposed J-Pop channel? .........
I'm still disappointed that J-Pop hasn't come about.
Posted by: espnjason | September 18, 2007 1:18 PM
It is nice to know that we will have a south asian channel. I am from south india. Most of my friends from that region listen to SATRAD for their daily commute.
Posted by: Mahesh | September 18, 2007 9:29 PM
Hey Timbrat- if you looking for your type of channles Sirus has 5 of them subscribe to them.
Posted by: icecat | September 27, 2007 4:57 AM