Eutelsat — Capacity For ZON’ing In Angola

Eutelsat Communications (Euronext Paris: ETL) has signed a major contract with UPSTAR Comunicações for satellite capacity for the broadcasting of ZAP pay-TV platform, expected to launch shortly in Angola. UPSTAR Comunicações is a joint venture between ZON Multimedia, one of the leading Portuguese media groups, and the Angolan group SOCIP.

The five-year contract covers the lease of five Ku-band transponders on the Southern Africa beam of Eutelsat’s W7 satellite, which began operational service in January this year. ZAP will assemble a strong component of channels in Portuguese, and will drive innovation into content broadcast in high definition. It will include a “Max package” of 50 channels and a “Premium package” of 80 channels with a mix of channels featuring TV series, films, music, children’s programmes, news, sports and documentaries.

Content for ZAP will be uplinked to Eutelsat’s W7 satellite from UPSTAR’s teleports in Luanda and in Vendas Novas, Portugal. The high power of W7’s African beam will enable reception across Angola with small antennas. User equipment will include a 60-cm dish connected to decoders equipped with Nagravision encryption and a HD-DVR with 250 hours of storage capacity. To optimise bandwidth usage, channels will be broadcast in DVB-S2 with MPEG4 compression.