Premiere World is planning to increase the amount and variety of programmes shown on pay-per-view. Subscribers will be able, from this autumn, to order selected top sports events via PPV. According to Markus Tellenbach, chairman of Premiere World’s management, boxing matches and possibly live games from the first division football league Bundesliga will be shown, subject to successful negotiations with the DFB football association.

Tellenbach is targeting about one third of the subscribers of the ‘Sports World’ package option for PPV sports. Meanwhile, the Kirch Group/News Corp-owned platform is moving ahead with its plans for a fourth package option after ‘Family World’, ‘Movie World’ and ‘Sports World’. On March 1, ‘Gala World’ targeting older viewers will be launched, with up to six channels. Featured as part of the latest addition will be Heimatkanal, showing German movies from the 50s and 60s and Filmpalast, which screens black and white movies. Both channels have so far been marketed as stand alone services, available at a small additional fee. Also included will be a channel with mostly German-produced recent TV series and movies as well as German Schlager channel GoldStar TV, operated by the production company of former DF1 managing director Gottfried Zmeck. Subscribers of ‘Gala World’ will also be able to watch the German-language version of Discovery Channel, which will continue to form part of the ‘Family World’ package as well.

The new bouquet will be available both as a stand alone option for a yet to be disclosed monthly fee and for an additional fee of DM5 monthly on top of the ‘Superpaket’ which includes all other three packages.

Premiere World’s Austrian subscribers meanwhile will be able to watch Austria Television (ATV), the sucessor of Vienna-based cable channel Wien 1 which launched on January 17 on Austrian cable networks, reaching 900,000 cable homes. The channel, the majority ownership of which was taken over by Munich-based entrepreneur Herbert Kloiber and cable company UPC last summer, will become available as a bonus channel at the end of March. For copyright reasons, ATV will not be receivable in Germany. Currently, the pay-TV operator’s digital platform on Astra (19.2 degrees East) is used by ATV for feeding cable headends.

Also joining will be N24, Pro Sieben’s 24-hour news channel. An N24 spokesman exclusively revealed to Interspace that talks are currently underway to include the advertising-financed channel on Premiere World as a free to air service. No date has been fixed yet. Currently N24 is only available in analogue on Astra, using Teleclub’s former transponder 55 (10.803 GHz H).

Meanwhile, Premiere World has ordered 600,000 digital set top boxes from Sagem for over Fr1 billion (Euro 150 million). According to Sagem, the set-top box, IRD4500, is a new generation d-box multimedia terminal for digital TV reception and Internet applications. Premiere World said that the delivery of the Sagem decoders to subscribers will begin in March, adding that this latest order will secure the availability of the d-box in great numbers. "Apart from the 700,000 new subscribers which we expect to acquire this year, another 900,000 existing analogue subscribers will be converted until the end of 2001," said managing director Ferdinand Kayser.