[by Cerius Shah] With a bevy of IIT’ians and IIM’ians as host and anchors, Greycells18 Media has announced the launch of its TV channel Topper. The content will cater to classes IX to XII providing curriculum based content that complies to CBSE and other related state boards. Content will be initially limited to Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics. The channel is currently available via DTH (Tata Sky and Dish TV).

According to the release, Greycells 18 is a JV between Sunil Khanna (former head DTH, Reliance & CEO, DishTV), and Sricharan Iyengar (former, VP and Business Head ESPN (NYSE: DIS) Star Sports). It is co-promoted by Raghav Bahl of Network18 and Shantanu Prakash of Educomp, in their personal capacities and Network18’s private equity initiative- Capital18.
Topperlearning.com is divided in scope based on the users grade and has sections like Ask an Expert, a forum, tests and text versions of the teachings. The channel is free to air till Feb 15 2008. As per the website, they are looking at a bundled learning model but keeping the website free to view. For long, the domain around educational content was owned by Navneet, their interactive plans as of now are limited to an e-book. A similar initiative for SSC boards was launched by Doordarshan sometime in 1999, I remember watching a few episodes related to my class subjects and finding it more enriching than my school lectures, after a prompt 15 seconds of an uncannily similar boredom, I switched back to cartoons. Topper also offers solved papers of previous years (coming soon). Now if only someone thought about a way to give ‘importants’ for future exams.