The Chinese broadcaster CCTV has chosen GlobeCast for its distribution of its French language channel CCTV-F to the European market. MTV Networks International has also chosen Globecast for the recent launch of MTV HD.
CCTV-F features news, tourism and educational programmes, as well as Chinese performance art. Catered to an international audience, the programmes carry French subtitles with some news programmes hosted by French-speaking journalists. GlobeCast receives CCTV-F’s signal at its technical operation facility in Paris, where it is encoded and multiplexed for uplink. GlobeCast is also providing monitoring services to CCTV-F.
MTV HD carries music based and kids’ programming, with over 300 hours of native HD programming.
The 24-hour English-language HD service will initially be available in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Poland and Sweden, with plans to expand to France, Germany, The Netherlands, Portugal, the UK, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela in the coming months.
GlobeCast receives MTVNI’s HD channel, along with five MTV channels in SD, via fibre at its Brookmans Park Technical Operations Centre. From there, it is uplinked to Eutelsat’s Hot Bird 6 satellite.
A number of channels have been switched from Hot Bird 6 to create capacity for MTV HD offering, including MTV Portugal which is now managed on GlobeCast’s new transponder on Eurobird 9, located at 9° East. (See Broadband TV News)