Consumer and professional electronics company Philips announced two deals at BroadcastAsia 2000 and CommunicAsia 2000 in Singapore on 6 June. The first relates to the commencement of the supply of set top boxes to Zee Telefilms while the second relates to a news production equipment order placed by software production company and CNBC India co-promoter TV18.

The DSX6071/94 DVB-compliant set top boxes which Philips is supplying to Zee Telefilms are for its direct to operator digital TV channel bouquet project. Zee Telefilms had ordered 25,000 set top boxes but Philips expects this to go up by another 100,000. The boxes are installed with Mediaguard and Mediahighway software supplied by French company Canal Plus Technologies which will allow Zee TV to encrypt its channels, which are currently free to air. Zee TV hopes to charge India's 30,000 to 40,000 strong cable operator community a licence fee to retransmit its bouquet of 8-12 television channels. A smart card will be supplied to the cable ops after payment of the licence fees.

Philips had earlier installed a nine-channel DVB-MPEG2 compression system for Zee TV's satellite uplink facility in Singapore. The facility includes the Philips Stremflux Video Encoder and the flexible StreamFlux TokenMux Multiplexer.

The TV18 order includes three LDK100 camera systems, a DD-series live production switcher, and a Venus facility router to produce general news and business news programmes for CNBC India.