TAS, the telecommunications authority of Suriname, has issued two DTT licences.
The licences were issued to Wise, a subsidiary of Suriname telecommunications service provider Telesur, and to DBC, part of the Rapar Broadcasting Network.
For the moment, test broadcasts will be carried out before full services will start in 2015. The offer will include both free-to-air and encrypted premium programming. Set-top boxes are expected to cost around SRD 150 (EUR34).
Telesur’s Wise is rolling out a DVB-T2 platform with Divitel. The new hybrid platform is tailor-made for Wise and based on the DVB-T2 standard combined with interactivity (including video on demand) via the internet. Divitel designed and delivered the new platform.
“What is important to me is that I enter into a partnership, which is something else than the relationship I have with the supermarket chain in which I shop weekly,” said Lloyd Groenhart, former project manager at Telesur and now managing director at Wise.
“Partnership from a Surinamese perspective is about looking after each other from a commercial, technical, operational and so on, perspective.”
Anil Sadhoeram, managing director of Divitel Americas started the project and supervised it, making use of Divitel’s international engineering teamt: “Divitel is proud to be the first company that implements the DVB-T2 technology in Latin America. We’re grateful that innovative telecommunication company Telesur has chosen us to design and implement a television platform making use of the brand new DVB-T2 technology standard.”
Rapar Broadcasting Network (RBN) is a commercial television station. It is an affiliated company of Dagblad Suriname, a daily news paper published in Paramaribo.
