MUMBAI: Rupert Murdoch's Star TV is to let go or reassign 100 employees, many of them highly paid technical experts, when it closes its Hong Kong satellite uplink facility, a newspaper report said on Saturday.

The South China Morning Post quoted Jannie Poon Lai-king, V-P for corporate affairs and publicity as saying that Star plans to outsource its uplinking. "Today, there are many competitively priced uplink providers in the market,'' Poon was quoted as saying explaining the reasoning behind a move that is expected to result in considerable savings.

"We now find there is a huge difference between outsourcing the rest of the channels to a third party versus continuing to invest in state-of-the-art technology in Clearwater Bay," Poon said.

Star's satellite uplink centre at Clearwater Bay reportedly uplinks satellite feeds for more than 30 channels to 53 countries across Asia.

The newspaper further reported that Star is also planning to close its expensive headquarters in Hong Kong's Clearwater Bay and relocate its corporate base to HungHom, Kowloon.