Belatedly Intelsat has told us that it was behind the delivery of the video services for the South African MultiChoice DVB-H mobile TV trial that has been running for a while now since November for 2,000 people in Johannesburg, Soweto, Pretoria and Cape Town.
From its headquarters in Randburg, South Africa, MultiChoice is uplinking 10 to 12 trial channels of sports, entertainment, news, music and specially developed ‘made for mobile’ content to Intelsat’s IS-902 satellite, which then distributes the content to multiple terrestrial transmitter sites throughout the trial region.
Satellite is probably the cheapest way to deliver synchronized DVB-H signals, whether it is direct to each low power transmitter or to one high powered master transmitter and then forwarded using repeaters.
Intelsat said that this is the third mobile video trial that it has supported and that is has deployments going ahead in Europe and in the United States.