The Stellat 5 is the first satellite to be deployed by Stellat, a joint venture formed in January 2001 by France Telecom and Europe*Star, a subsidiary of Alcatel Space and Loral Space & Communications, with the former holding a 70 per cent stake in the JV.. The Stellat 5 satellite was built by Alcatel Space, using the Spacebus 3000 B3 platform. It will be positioned at 5 degrees West, and is equipped with 35 Ku-band and 10 C-band transponders. Stellat 5 will help bolster the IP and video transmission services offered by France Telecom and Europe*Star in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, specially Internet access with a satellite return channel.

N-STAR c, a mobile telephony satellite, was launched for the American companies Orbital Sciences Corp and Lockheed Martin Commercial Space Systems as part of a turnkey contract with Japanese operator NTT DoCoMo. The satellite was built by Lockheed Martin Commercial Space Systems, which supplied the payload and was responsible for integration. Dulles, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp. provided the platform and ground facilities, and will handle satellite positioning in orbit. Fitted with 20 S-band transponders and one C-band transponder, N-STAR c will expand the mobile telephony services offered by NTT DoCoMo throughout Japan, says Arianespace.

The next Ariane mission Flight 155, is slated for late August. An Ariane 5 will boost two satellites into geostationary transfer orbit: Atlantic Bird 1 for Alenia Spazio, and Eumetsat‘s MSG 1 meteorological spacecraft. Atlantic Bird 1 satellite will be used and operated by Eutelsat as part of its fleet. It will be positioned in geostationary orbit at 12.5 degrees West, above the Atlantic Ocean.

It has been a long wait mired in litigation for SET and the show‘s producer UTV (the original announcement was made on 28 August 2001) and the channel must be hoping the delay does not impact negatively on it. This might well be the reason for the change of name as there are too many "bad vibes" around it.

Sony‘s problems started after Taal Communications, which had earlier announced its own weekly matchmaking show Swayamvar, slated for an October 2001 launch on national broadcaster Doordarshan, went to court charging copyright violation.

In its suit, Taal, promoted by Anil Gupta, a former consultant with Zee, and actor politician Vinod Khanna, claimed that the original concept belonged to it and that it had made several presentations to the channel over the past three years without any response after which they approached DD and got approval.

According to industry sources, Sony and Gupta reached an out-of-court agreement last week to "amicably resolve" the issue. Gupta will be an advisor on KNKKH for the time the show is on air and will get a fee per episode, sources say.

With an estimated Rs 200 million sunk in and around 40 episodes in the can, the news comes as a big shot in the arm for Sony which has three other big ticket shows being readied for launch.

Apart from KNKKH, the next two months is expected to see the launch of Russian Roulette, which is a licenced product from Sony Pictures International. The show has been a huge success wherever it has broadcast. There is also a musical format game show launching soon. Then there is the Balaji weekender series that is set to launch. It will run for thirteen weeks over 39 episodes.

Rajiv Vyas, newly promoted COO of IndusInd Media & Communications Ltd (IMC), of which INCableNet is the operations arm, spoke in a similar vein while stating the two sides had worked out a month-long bridge period in which to resolve all outstanding issues and come to an agreement which would be beneficial to both sides. Vyas added that Star had sent them a proposal in which they‘d sought a response in 48 hours. It was not an ultimatum, Vyas said.

The ad also made a strong plea for the introduction of conditional access systems (CAS) at the earliest as the only way to resolve this matter in the long term.