Eutelsat has announced its Atlantic Bird 3 satellite will provide coverage of the French market for Orange TV. The five degrees West position has historically been used to provide coverage of the French terrestrial channels in areas where over the air reception is patchy.
Atlantic Bird 3 will join with the Eutelsat Hot Bird neighbourhood at 13 degrees East to provide the TV element of Orange’s triple play service in areas where ADSL is unavailable. Given that these are just the areas where terrestrial TV is also likely to be at its weakest justifies the dual satellite proposition. Between them the two positions already reach 4.8 million antennas in France.
A new version of the Orange TV Livebox is being developed for satellite reception. Orange TV sister company GlobeCast, already a major Eutelsat partner, is slated to provide uplink facilities.
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