UTV Stars is a Bollywood lifestyle and glamour dedicated Indian-television channel from UTV Group. It is available in high-definition and standard-definition across India and UAE. Broadly, the content of the channel focuses on Bollywood news and music. The channel is primarily targeted at urban Indian youth.
The channel launched on Sky in the UK and Ireland on 11 June 2012. In the region the channel was known as UMP Stars (UTV Motion Pictures Stars) due to legal issues over the UTV brand, which was already in use by the Northern Irish broadcaster UTV Media in Europe.However the channel struggled to attract viewers in the region and closed on 23 December 2012.
UTV Motion Pictures is a film unit of Disney-UTV, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company. UTV Motion Pictures have formed one of the leading film studios in India. The Studio’s activities span across creative development, production, marketing, distribution, licensing, merchandising and syndication of films in India and worldwide.
UTV Motion Pictures as a dominant player in the Indian film industry has been in the forefront of bringing Indian films to a global audience and the last decade in Indian cinema has seen UTV Motion Pictures delivering some of the most iconic films. UTV Motion Pictures’ films have also been selected to represent India at the Academy awards; films were Rang De Basanti (2006), Harishchandrachi Factory (2009) Peepli Live (2010) and Barfi! (2012). In 2011, UTV Motion Pictures also became one of the few studios to successfully venture into South Indian cinema. UTV Motion Pictures has a library of over 70 films including Hindi, Regional, Animation and International Productions, which have been showcased in over 50 festivals across 28 countries, receiving almost 250 awards in the last 7 years.
UTV Media is a broadcasting and New Media company based in Belfast in Northern Ireland. It is a constituent of the FTSE SmallCap Index. UTV Media oversees operations of the ITV Network across Northern Ireland, and it is also the owner of UTV Radio, which operates the UK Independent National Radio station talkSPORT, along with 16 radio stations in the United Kingdom and 5 in the Republic of Ireland. UTV is available terrestrially to 98% of Northern Ireland’s population, and is now available, through a number of platforms as well as via terrestrial overspill, to 70% of the Republic of Ireland’s.