The Singapore Identity
~ Journey to Finding our Roots ~
The launch of Vasantham was within 1 month of the offering of a 24-hour Tamil channel, Vannathirai (or VTV) by SCV. Vasantham was launched, according to Lim Suat Jien, MD of TV12, as a result of "invaluable feedback from Indians living in Singapore" who "want their own channel with a local flavour".
Vasantham seems to be a good move by Mediacorp to counter the threat of cable tv’s indian channels as there were signs that Starhub was worried about competition for viewers. To attract sign-ups in time for the Indian holiday of Deepavali in late October 2008, StarHub slashed subscription rates for the first three months of its new channel by 50 per cent.
The rise of cable TV providers, for example Starhub Cable TV (SCV), have channels which are appealing to the Indian community such as Sun TV, Vijay, Starplus and Zee TV. These channels posed a threat to local Indian production as well as viewership and therefore increasing the need for Mediacorp to have its own dedicated Indian language channel, Vasantham.
This threat of competition is substantiated by views of the laypeople, like retiree M. Rajasegeran, 61, who now pays about 100 dollars a month for cable television to get his fix of Tamil programmes. 'They [shows on Vasantham Central] were shown only at night on weekdays and in the afternoons on weekends, so I had to subscribe to cable,' he said. 'Now I can cut down on those cable channels, and save about 40 dollars a month.'