The channel has roped in former Managing Director of

ESPN Star R C Venkateish as a consultant, especially in areas related to content acquisition.

Discovery has been present in India for nearly 20 years with different global brands such as Discovery Channel, TLC, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, Science and Turbo/Velocity.

The media firm is also planning to expanding its reach in the country by localising content, starting with its flagship channel Discovery.

"India is one of the top 3-5 priority markets for Discovery and we are going to make significant investments. We are going to invest heavily in widening the reach of Discovery in India. We are going to go after mass consumers. So far Discovery has been an urban metro kind of niche but we are now going to tier II and tier III consumers," he said.

"We will expand our genres from survival and outdoors to military, which is aspirational to a consumer in tier II or tier III cities, and genres like crime and inspiration. We will also invest heavily in local content. Discovery in the last 10 years has had 5 hours of local content a year and starting from June we will have 200 hours of local content a year. At the end of 2017, we will have 50 per cent local content and 50 per cent international content," he added.

He declined to give the investment details for both sports and local content strategy but said the investment for the new initiatives are in millions of dollars.

(This article has not been edited by DNA's editorial team and is auto-generated from an agency feed.)