Vision TV, Ukraine’s fledgling DTH platform, has selected NDS to equip it with conditional access, middleware and EPG systems. Vision is the first company to be awarded a licence by the Ukrainian government for DTH broadcasting, although rival companies Poverkhost and DataGroup already have services underway.
NDS will provide Vision TV with its VideoGuard conditional access and MediaHighway middleware, as well as an electronic program guide. Vision will use MPEG-4 compression as the platforms vie to be the most technologically advanced.
“We want to ensure that we can evolve with our market and easily roll out additional services in the future such as a DVR, pay-per-view, video on demand, and high definition,” said Richard Caproni, general director of Vision TV. He added that NDS offered the best solution to protect the platform against piracy, which has a history in the Ukrainian pay-TV market.
A recent forecast by EEBC, suggested Ukraine could have 850,000 new DTH subscribers in the next three years and up to 2.5 million by 2012.