IBC 2010 – AMSTERDAM. Greece’s Hellas Sat hopes to launch another satellite to meet demand from Romania and Bulgaria, where it provides services to the DTH platforms Dolce and Bulsatcom respectively. Speaking to Broadband TV News, Christos Papachristos, sales manager, SE &E Europe, Hellas Sat, said that the company’s single satellite Hellas-2, which is located at 39 degrees East, could easily fill a second satellite. The latter is planned but no date has been announced.
He added that Bulsatcom, which is interested in expanding its activities into Serbia, may also co-operate with Romtelecom’s Dolce to make more efficient use of existing capacity.
Local reports in Greece meanwhile say that the planned launch date of OTE’s DTH platform has been put back from this month to December.
The service will compete with Multichoice’s Nova, which is distributed by Hot Bird and currently has around 500,000 subscribers.
OTE also began building a FTTH network before the onset of the economic crisis that it has yet to complete.
The telco, which is backed by Deutsche Telekom, is planning a number of cost-cutting measures.