Asian TV channels return on-air after major fault

Asian TV channels on Sky Digital resumed normal programming after a major technical failure at BT Tower took the channels off-air for over 35 minutes.

Channels including Sony TV, Star Plus, Star Gold, Star News, Star One, ZEE TV, ZEE Cinema, Zing, ZEE Punjabi, Colors, Imagine and ARY Digital Dil Se were amongst the channels affected.

The fault occurred shortly before 20:00 this evening. Most of the channels were displaying a frozen image of what was being aired prior to the problem. Some channels displayed a “There is a technical fault with this channel. Please try later” message.

Incidentally, Star Gold had scheduled its huge TV premiere of ‘Bodyguard’ starring Salman Khan and Kareena Kapoor at 20:00 but many viewers had missed out on the beginning of the film due to the outage.

Some readers reported faults with other mainstream channels too including HD versions of ITV1, ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4. ITV1’s flagship show ‘X Factor’ was also affected by the huge fault as the live show’s start was replaced with old footage from the show.

One BT spokesman told Daily Mail there was an ‘unusual power spike’, while another source said a circuit breaker tripped, adding: ‘Engineers are checking if there was an anomaly with the current or the voltage.’

Transmission resumed back to normal just after 20:30.