MUMBAI: Telekom Malaysia‘s pay- television service HyppTV has inked a carriage deal with French international news channel France 24 which will see the channel being aired via TM‘s high-speed broadband service, UniFi.

HyyppTV executive vice president new media Jeremy Kung said the company expected to attract about 2,000 expatriates within two years and about 20,000 university and college students going forward. "France 24 will complement other international and local news channels that are available on HyyppTV, which offers 87 channels consisting of 19 free channels, 33 premium channels, 17 video-on-demand genres and 18 interactive channels," he told reporters after the launch of the channel.

Kung said the targeted audience-cum-UniFi subscribers would be French expatriates, Malaysian public, particularly the French-speaking group, as well as French-speaking tourists such as from Belgium.

France 24 Asia-Pacific distribution director Brice Bertrand added, “Our first-tier target is French expatriates in Malaysia. There are some 4,000 French people living in Malaysia currently. Second-tier target market would be the Malaysian public and lastly tourism but not limited to French but also Canadian, Belgians and Swiss."

France 24 is broadcast in French, English and Arabic. It has reached 245 million households worldwide and attracted 45 million TV viewers each week.