Arqiva Supports GTV In Africa

Arqiva has announced it has successfully supported GTV in their plans to roll out in multiple markets in Africa. GTV, Africa’s new digital pay-TV platform, is designed to make premium international and local entertainment content more accessible to more Africans.
Arqiva is providing GTV with a comprehensive product portfolio from system design to playout and content aggregation. Content from a variety of sources, including Sony, Time Warner and the African Movie Channel, undergoes basic editing, quality control, technical correction and normalisation at Arqiva’s Chalfont Grove studio facility in the UK. Transmission master tapes are created through the addition of metadata, including timecodes, tape IDs and programme IDs, to support customer scheduling requirements.
Master tapes are ingested and digitised before being played out and digitally archived from the Chalfont Media Centre.
Arqiva was approached by GTV in May 2006 and worked closely with key figures in GTV to determine a broad-based flexible solution to meet its emerging requirements.
A multi-year contract was signed with Gateway Broadcast Services in March 2007. Following a pilot phase the full service went live on 28 May 2007 and GTV initiated its phased pan-Africa rollout with Kenya’s launch on 29 July 2007.
GTV is now available in 12 African countries with new markets being added each month. The projected roll-out covers all sub-Saharan countries with the exception of Nigeria and South Africa.
Playout features enabled on GTV’s own channels, G Prime, G Sports 1 and G Sports 2, include advanced graphical overlay incorporating digital video squeeze-back effects and injection of remote data.
International content is aggregated from various satellites and fibre backhauls including content substitution features for events to which GTV do not currently have the distribution rights.
Arqiva also provides a fully managed co-location service for GTV’s multiplexes, conditional access and EPG head-end equipment, which is integrated into Arqiva’s Media Centre in the UK.
For further information on Arqiva:
www.arqiva.com
(DS)