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VISION FOR THE FUTURE

that meets international standards.

This year, the company celebrates its fifth year of continuous success through providing a series of continuous promotions and offers to its customers. The company also implemented a set of enhancements and advancements to satisfy its continuous drive to elevate the level of quality for its products.

To discuss the company's rapid growth, City Times caught with Humaid Rashid Sahoo, E-Vision's Chief Executive Officer.

When will your services cover the entire UAE? Have you set any deadline to achieve it?

Our projected time span to cover the UAE is highly correlated to the availability of technological infrastructure. We reached 20,000 homes five years ago while now we cover around 3,00,000 homes within the UAE. This figure reflects 60 per cent of the number of households within the country.

How have your interactive services — e-View and Games — performed since their launch? Do you believe there needs to be better customer education about your interactive services?

So far this year has proven to be very successful for us, whether in terms of offerings, value added services, and technological advancements that have been introduced — some that are available to our customers, while others put us at a cutting edge as far as advancements in the field of TV entertainment. More exciting packages are yet to come in the next couple of months.

What type of new services do you have in development?

Our software development team has been working on our Electronic Programme Guide. It will enable viewers to search channels by genres, movies, sport, kids, etc. In the second phase of development it will also be able to set a reminder function for programmes that are coming up in the future.

It also provides Movie information and schedules for our e-View Pay-per-View service and audio information for our radio channels. And for the newbies there's a context sensitive Help section, which is accessible throughout the EPG.

Another Service we currently have on trial is a Messaging service titled TVMail, this allows us to send messages to our subscribers with the latest updates on all of our latest news. We also have a mobile phone service that we'll be adding to the e-Active Games and Horoscope service, which will enable users to download ring tones, screensavers and games to their mobile phones using an SMS gateway. The big one for next year is the World Cup in High Definition. Our network infrastructure is already in place. What we're waiting for now is for the channel operators to confirm their carriage rights.