ESPN Star Sports (ESS) Super Selector Fantasy Cricket Game, the interactive game launched on the sports broadcaster‘s India services in September 2001, surpassed its own world record for the number of monthly entries received for any single on-line game conducted across the globe.

Super Selector broke its own world record when over 265,000 participants registered on www.espnstar.com to play the web-based game in November, more than double the 109,907 participants in October who registered in the first 10 days of the game‘s launch, an ESS press release said.

Participants from all over India registered to play the monthly competition, with western India leading the pack with 78,967 participants, followed by 71,921 from south India, 56,363 from the North and 27,048 from east India.

The remaining 30,000 entries were from outside India. Nearly 50 per cent of the respondents were in the 16-21 age group, 24 per cent were 22-30 years old and 16 per cent were below 15.

ESS managing director Rik Dovey said: "The success of the Super Selector game continues to scale new heights in interactivity. The synergy and integration of this project, both on and off air, has given us and our sponsors an unprecedented opportunity to connect with our target audiences in an innovative way, while bringing cricket to a new level of enjoyment - never seen before in Asia."

Super Selector is sponsored by Kingfisher Premium Lager Beer, TVS Victor Motorbikes and Peter England Apparel.

Times are tough in television these days with the advertising pie shrinking. And channels are resorting to the tack of running older shows. Star, Zee, Sabe, DD have all done it. Can Sahara TV be far behind?
Not really. Following the lead of other satellite channels which have started repeat telecasts of successful shows, Sahara TV has started airing Wilayattee Babu from 5 November.

An episodic sitcom series, Wilayattee Babu‘s star cast includes Shekhar Suman, Sudhir Pandey, Rakesh Bedi, Farha, Divya Seth, Seema Kapoor, Navneet Nishan, Bharat Kapoor, Bhavna Balsavar and Yunus Parvez. Each episode aims at hilariously highlighting the differences between the Asia and the West, and the storyline revolves around an NRI‘s antics on coming home to India.

Produced by Future Communications and directed by Raju Parsekar, Wilayattee Babu was earlier aired on terrestrial channel Doordarshan.

Says Sahara vice-president communications Priya Raj : "Satellite channels have a different and better reach than a terrestrial channel and we hope to get a better response. This was a weekly show earlier but now it is being aired as a daily at 7.30 pm Mondays to Fridays. Within the next two to three weeks, we should know viewers‘ response and ratings. Currently, we have feedback that the show is getting a good response, that there is good awareness about it."

The show presently has two associate sponsors in All Out and MDH Masala, and is on the lookout for additional advertisers and sponsors.