MUMBAI: Star Plus is expanding its frontiers. The Indian expat community in Australia and New Zealand can now tune in to India's leading Hindi entertainment channel.

The channel began beaming on Vision Asia's South Asian pay TV direct-to-home platform over the weekend.

The Star Plus channel will however, not be broadcast "as-is", official sources have said. This is because the network does not have the worldwide telecast rights for all the programmes that are on air on the channel, the sources have said. The programming gaps will be filled up by Star News bulletins.

The bouquet of South Asian channels is downlinked in Sydney, digitised and encrypted for uplinking onto the Globecast platform of Optus B3 Australia and New Zealand beam.

The market down under is a very small one though. Vision Asia has a subscriber base of between 2,500 and 3,000, the sources aver. Vision Asia earlier brought the Zee and Sony TV channels to the antipodes.