BBC Announces Asia-Pacific Deals

SYDNEY/BRIGHTON, March 2: At the BBC Showcase in Brighton,
BBC Worldwide announced that it had secured a deal with Korean mobile
television broadcaster TU Media for Top Gear and had licensed more than 300 hours of lifestyle content into New
Zealand.

The Korea deal calls for the distribution of 39 hours of Top
Gear programming on TU Media’s Satellite
Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (S-DMB) service. Launched in May 2005, TU
Media’s S-DMB service currently attracts almost 1 million subscribers.

In New Zealand, meanwhile, BBC Worldwide’s Australasian arm
has licensed more than 300 hours of cookery, lifestyle and factual programming
to the Living Channel and its sister network, Food TV, including over 100 hours
of first-run programming.

Starting from March, some of the titles expected to premiere
on Food TV are Celebrity Masterchef Goes Large (15×30), Saturday Kitchen 2006 (20×30), James Martin Digs Deep (10×25), Rick Stein’s Betjeman and Me (1×49) and United States of Reza (12×23). There will also be encore showings of The
Naked Chef, Wild Harvest with
Nick Nairn, Friends for Dinner and Dinner in a Box with Curtis Stone.

Meanwhile, the Living Channel will air new seasons of A
Year at Kew, Life Coach Less Ordinary and Living
in the Sun. The package also includes Himalaya
with Michael Palin, four seasons of Antiques
Roadshow, Delia Smith’s Winter Collection,
two seasons of Friends for Dinner
and the return of Ainsley’s Barbecue Bible.