Trio of now TV Channels Launching in Malaysia

HONG KONG: now TV has secured a deal with Telekom Malaysia (TM) to bring three branded channels to the HyppTV IPTV service.

The agreement is for the Chinese-language services now International, now Mango and now HaiRun. now International features a variety of cooking, lifestyle and travel programs, alongside a range of entertainment news series and variety shows. now Mango—a joint venture between now TV and Hunan Broadcasting System—features a roster of A-listers from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan appearing on the interview talk shows Happy Camp and Women of the World. The service also programs Chinese entertainment and variety series that feature pop stars and celebrities from the region. now HaiRun is a channel for drama series. Its offerings include The Era of Late Marriage and Special Citizen.

The pact covers multiple platforms, providing HyppTV customers with the ability to watch now TV content on the Internet, mobile devices and tablets as well.

Janice Lee, PCCW’s managing director of TV and new media, said, “International expansion is one of our key strategies to further grow our business. Malaysia has one of the largest overseas Chinese populations in Southeast Asia and we are excited to have TM as our first international content distribution partner. TM is a leading triple-play operator in Malaysia with compelling and unique content for its IPTV customers. This partnership demonstrates our strength in producing and managing premium content across [multiple] platforms. We will work closely to provide the very best of Chinese programs to the viewers in Malaysia. This project marks an important first step of our international expansion plan and we look forward to announcing our other new achievements very soon.”

Jeremy Kung, the executive VP of new media at Telekom Malaysia, added, “We are delighted to be working with Hong Kong’s largest pay-TV operator, now TV, in bringing the three exciting new channels exclusively to our subscribers for the first time. To date, HyppTV offers its customers 105 channels with 28 channels in HD—consisting of 19 free channels, 45 premium channels, 22 video-on-demand (VOD) genres and 19 interactive channels. This is a big milestone and a significant growth for us after starting out just two years ago with only 22 channels.”

Kung continued, “Partnering with now TV, we not only have among the best in Asian entertainment and lifestyle content on our platform, but also one of the biggest collection of Chinese drama ever assembled on HyppTV. With these efforts, we hope to satisfy the demands of our every growing HyppTV subscribers by having more channels for them to choose from.”