Tuesday, March 13, 2007

OpenTV Launches on DishTV, India`s First and Fastest-Growing Satellite Service



SAN FRANCISCO, March 14 (ANTARA/PRNewswire-AsiaNet) --

Deployment Achieved in Record Time



OpenTV Corp. (Nasdaq: OPTV), a leading provider of enabling technologies for advanced television and cross-platform interactive services, today announced that it has successfully integrated and downloaded its Core2 software to over 1,400,000 set-top boxes for DishTV. DishTV, part of the Essel Group of companies, has launched advanced digital television services that include a new guide, interactive cricket, multi-angle interactive news, and a suite of games from OpenTV's PlayJam service. The integration and deployment of the software and services took less than four months, an industry record for a launch of this size.

The next phase of deployment will introduce further applications as well as a PVR built around OpenTV's PVR2 software. With over one million subscribers and an expected annual growth rate of 100% per year, Essel Group expects to deploy similar OpenTV-enabled services to a portion of its Siticable customer base, India's largest at approximately 6.5 million subscribers, as Sitibase converts its cable systems from analog to digital. Conax conditional access is used by DishTV.

According to Mike Ivanchenko, Senior Vice President & Managing Director, Asia Pacific, at OpenTV, "We're delighted with the speed with which our team was able to launch DishTV services. The Indian market is a huge opportunity for OpenTV, and being able to serve a vast and growing number of subscribers quickly and without technical problems is imperative in order to be successful. With analysts projecting a compound annual growth rate of 10% for the Indian pay TV market, we expect to see 70 million digital subscriber households by the year 2010, and OpenTV is well-positioned to be able to meet their needs for advanced digital television services."

"Working with OpenTV has resulted in a mutually beneficial partnership that has dramatically accelerated the growth of digital television in India," said Jawahar Goel, Additional Vice Chairman of Essel Group. "The basic boxes we have deployed are perfectly suited to the Indian market, but difficult to deploy. OpenTV's speed in launching with these boxes will enable subscribers to immediately take advantage of 'enhanced cricket' and other interactive services for which viewers have been clamoring."

About Open TV
OpenTV is one of the world's leading providers of solutions for the delivery of digital and interactive television. The company's software has been integrated in over 81 million digital set-top boxes and digital televisions around the world. The software enables enhanced program guides, video-on-demand, personal video recording, enhanced television, interactive shopping, interactive and addressable advertising, games and gaming and a variety of consumer care and communication applications. For more information, please visit www.opentv.com.

About Essel Group
Essel Group has a vast range of national and global business interests that include media programming, broadcasting and distribution, packaging, entertainment, online gaming, and telecom.

Essel Group has always been a pioneer-Zee TV was the first Indian satellite channel, Siticable the first MSO, Esselworld the first theme park, Playwin the first online lottery, Essel Propack the world's number one in packaging-all revolutionary concepts in their respective fields.

Continuing with the same path-breaking tradition, the group has recently launched DishTV, India's first DTH service, which in a short span of time has established itself as the leading content provider with in India, bringing to the viewers a new era of premium quality TV viewing. DishTV is going to provide its live service on Kingfisher premium airline, the second airline in the world to deploy such capability.

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