Southern Africa Direct Delivered On Sky

Arqiva’s Satellite Media Solutions division has announced that it is supporting the delivery of Southern Africa Direct, a new free-to-air lifestyle and culture television channel, onto the UK Sky Digital platform channel 283.
Southern Africa Direct is the UK’s first ‘Destination TV’ channel, providing an authentic and engaging information source for anyone interested in visiting or building commercial links with Southern Africa. The channel’s content includes lifestyle & culture, travel & tourism and commerce programming related to the Southern Africa region.
To deliver the channel, Arqiva is providing Southern Africa Direct with 3.5Mb/s of space on the Eurobird satellite. Playout of the channel is from Arqiva’s Chalfont Grove facility where it is encoded, multiplexed and uplinked to the Eurobird satellite.
The fully managed playout service provides Southern Africa Direct with digital archive storage which increases the accessibility of content while reducing the need for tape-based re-ingest. Southern Africa Direct will be ingesting two hours of new content each day. The contract also provides for a downstream graphical package to allow scheduled graphics to be placed over the video content. These graphics can contain multiple layers which allow complex effects to be created for additional on-screen information and branding.
Arqiva's major customers include ITV, Channel 4, Five, the BBC, BSkyB, Classic FM, the five UK mobile operators, the RNLI and the Metropolitan Police.
www.arqiva.com
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