Italian thematic channel producer Sitcom will not seek an IPO before 2002 in order to give priority to it’s search for new partners.

Speaking at a recent press conference, Sitcom CEO Walter La Tona said that the main priority is the search for new industrial and financial partners. Livolsi & Partners has been assigned the role of advisor for possible foreign alliances and sources within Sitcom have told Interspace that “possible partners already seem to be well identified and official confirmation is expected very soon.”

Last December, the company started the procedure for an IPO but was forced to back down due to the withdrawal of the global co-ordinators, Chase Manhattan Bank and Robert Fleming (Chase Group).

La Tona also revealed that Sitcom’s channels will introduce multi-lingual audio by the end of the year and that a decision will soon be made as to which will be the first channel and in which language it will be translated.

“Taking in account our excellent relations with Germany, probably the order will be German, English and French. Taking also into account the excellent success of the Marcopolo channel in Poland, where it transmits via Cyfra Plus, we have more than 300,000 subscribers, in a country where the spread of cable TV is very strong.”

Sitcom’s CEO also revealed plans for the launch of two new channels. One of them will be a multimedia venture dedicated to ecology called Galileo, which will include a digital TV channel and Internet portal, while the second will be a channel for teenagers called Espresso, which may be entirely transmitted in English.