MUMBAI: The Tamil television space has one more player in the general entertainment arena. Tamil Thirai TV (TTV), controlled and managed by Tamil Entertainment Art Media Ltd, started its operations on 6 May.

Backed by the Tamill industry, the channel has popular film director Bharathiraja at its helm.

Addressing mediapersons, Bharatiraja had said the channel would showcase Tamil art and culture in an innovative way to stand out from other channels. TTV will beam to Asia, Europe, Australia, Africa and Gulf countries.

According to sources from Chennai, Kalanithi Maran's Sun Cable Vision (SCV) is carrying TTV on a prime band. Reportedly, many cable operators have also signed agreements to transmit the channel on a revenue sharing basis.

TTV has its weekdays primetime from 7 pm to 10:30 pm. The weekdays non-prime time is from 10:30 pm to 7:30 pm. The Saturday primetime is from 6 pm to 11 pm and the Sunday primetime ranges from 9 am to 10:30 pm.

TTV will be a free-to-air channel and the downlink frequency will be 4656 MHz and the symbol rate is 12.121Ms/s. The polarisation is vertical and FEC is 3/4. The channel will beam from Thaicom-3 satellite in Bangkok.

Though TTV won't be a competition for Sun TV in these initial years, it would definitely try to give a fight to the other prominent channels Raj TV, Vijay TV and Jaya TV. With the whole film industry supporting the channel, it would be interesting to see whether this relationship would help TTV to make headways in the film-crazy Tamil Nadu.