After years of suffering, Star World and Star World Premiere HD will be killed off. Meanwhile UTV-branded channels will be replaced by Star Gold-branded ones. An SD feed for Star Movies Select will also be launched.
HD feeds will be launched for Disney Channel and Hungama, while Marvel HQ will become Super Hungama, and BabyTV HD and Bindass will bid farewell from Indian TV.
A number of regional movie and sports channels are being launched, including the Marathi movie channel Pravah Picture. But the most noteworthy launch is perhaps Star Kirano, a new Odia GEC launching in January 2022.
Disney-Star’s new channels are largely in regional languages in the sports and movie genres, as well as a number of kids’ channels. On the other hand, a number of English channels and many of Disney’s channels before its acquisition of Star will go off air.
Disney-Star will finally have a Marathi movie channel, which was its only missing regional movie market. Meanwhile Sony has a long history of shutting down niche channels.
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An aggressive acquisition spree combined with proper scheduling and rotation of movies across its channels has given Disney-Star the lead in the Hindi movie genre. However, the impending Zee-Sony merger, Goldmines Telefilms’ Dhinchaak and a rapidly growing Viacom18 could pose a stiff challenge.
The rebranding to Zee Ganga was planned as early as 2017 but Zee became serious about the rebranding only this year and recently got MIB approval for the same.
Zee is ready to take the wraps off its South Indian HD movie channels Zee Thirai HD and Zee Picchar HD, beating Star and Sun to the race.