MUMBAI: Travelxp has made its first big international landing. Come 30 April, it will launch in the UK through the popular Freeview platform. This will be driven by Travelxp Europe MD Sumant Bahl who also leads Travelxp UK from its Greater London office. The network plans to strengthen its content capability by setting up its production houses first in the UK and subsequently in Eastern Europe and thereafter in the Americas. Travelxp CEO Prashant Chotani said that the UK production house would serve as the hub for western, central and eastern Europe within the next four to five months.
The channel has gone free-to-air in the UK while in every other territory, including India, Travelxp is a pay-TV channel. The company claims to have sold 100 per cent of its ad inventory for its UK channel.
Travelxp is relayed in local languages in countries such as the UK, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia and Bulgaria. The channel also has Hindi, Tamil and Bengali feeds in India. It will get into more Indian languages, including Marathi, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada, soon. France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary and Austria are also in the pipeline for launch.
The channel has made aggressive marketing plans targeting the large mainstream audience in the UK with TV campaigns on mainstream television and digital billboard screens across the UK on buses, the underground, and on social media, amongst other initiatives.
The network, which owns the IP for its content, has a digital platform in the works and details will be out by the year end.
“We are confident that our popular, premium travel-related entertainment and infotainment-driven content will connect with close to 16 million Freeview subscribers all over the UK. Every television manufactured in the UK after 2008 includes an inbuilt Freeview tuner that enables it to receive channels from Freeview, which is operated by DTV Services Ltd, a joint venture between the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky and transmitter operator Arqiva,” Chotani said.
With end-to-end in-house infrastructure of the latest technology and equipment, Travelxp’s lean crew teams produce programming in line with global standards. Only last week, it announced the launch of two new shows, Thali–The Great Indian Meal and City Breaks’ Uzbekistan series in seven global and three Indian languages.
The UK content will include the channel’s six main categories of destination, lifestyle, food, culture, nature and heritage.
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