Europe*Star is the contribution satellite of choice for uplinking South African-produced television content from Johannesburg to European viewers tuning in to Nsat`s budding subscription service.
Most of the viewers being targeted are hundreds of thousands of South Africans living in Britain.
Nsat launched its service in Britain on 9 August with free-to-air early morning and evening broadcasts on Sky TV`s channel. In December, the service will be available only to subscribers, at which time Europe*Star will encode the content in Johannesburg before it is transmitted via Europe*Star 1 to London.
Roy Ingle, Europe*Star`s Regional Director, Africa, says the 4.5MHz uplink has been leased by Nsat on a permanent basis as Nsat`s intention is to eventually provide 24-hour broadcast service of mainly South African soap operas, documentaries, sport, news summaries, magazine programmes and dramas.
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Europe*Star is a satellite owner-operator, offering capacity on its geostationary communications satellites. The company leases whole and fractional transponders on a full-time and occasional use basis, for use with a broad range of satellite communications services including television, Internet, telephony and corporate networking.
Brought into service at the start of 2001, the innovative Europe*Star 1 satellite has five high-performance beams covering Europe, southern Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and South East Asia. Its Europe*Star B satellite provides additional capacity for markets in Central and Eastern Europe.
An Alcatel company, Europe*Star is headquartered in London, with regional marketing offices in Cape Town and New Delhi. Europe*Star also operates its own mission control centre in Toulouse, for tracking, telemetry and control of the satellites.
For more information, visit http://www.europestar.com.
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