KUALA LUMPUR: ESPN STAR Sports (ESS) will begin airing its high-definition channel, ESPN HD, in Malaysia starting Saturday, Jan 30, with the live telecasts of the Australian Open women’s finals as well as the Barclays Premier League match between Arsenal and Manchester United.

ESPN HD was introduced in Malaysia as one of the five channels available on Astro’s high-definition TV services Astro B.yond, which was launched in December. The other four channels are Astro SuperSport HD, National Geographic Channel HD and History HD.

Astro is targeting for 500,000 of its current subscribers to take up Astro B.yond services by year-end.

According to ESS senior director of marketing and corporate communications Paras Sharma, Malaysia is the first market where ESPN HD will be launched, followed by other markets in the region over the next few months.

ESPN HD will feature premium sporting properties such as Barclays Premier League, UEFA Champions League, Formula 1, Moto GP, Australian Open, Wimbledon and other golf majors in high-definition, he said in a phone interview on Jan 27.

Sharma said advertising and promotion for ESPN HD would be done primarily through its own ESS channels, which are ESPN and STAR Sports, as the target market were the channels’ existing sports viewers. Astro would also be promoting ESPN HD as part of its Astro B.yond package.

ESPN HD was launched as part of ESS’s commitment to enrich sports fans’ experience of sports entertainment and to offer business partners more commercial opportunities, he said.

He added that ESPNews, ESS’s 24-hour sports news channel, would begin airing in Malaysia on Astro around end-February or early March. To date, ESPNews is already available in Myanmar, the Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam and Singapore.