• Five dedicated Arqiva antennas for C Band downlinks
• Centralised downlink, then signal multiplexing to Canalsat's Paris playout centre
• Strong added-value from Arqiva and expansion of its facilities in France

Paris:  Arqiva has today announced a contract with Multi TV Afrique, subsidiary of Canal Overseas-Canal+ Group, to improve the transmission quality of Canalsat Horizons, its digital multichannel TV package.  Until today, African TV channels on the digital multichannel TV package were downlinked on various sites within the Paris area.  Thanks to five new centralised and dedicated antennas, situated away from the interference zones, Arqiva is able to guarantee the quality of C Band downlinks for all African channels forming part of the digital multichannel TV package.  Downlinked signals will be multiplexed and sent to Canalsat's playout centre in Boulogne.

RTI, Radio Television of the Ivory Coast, will be the first African channel to benefit from this new infrastructure and will be followed by Supersport 3, RTB (Burkina), CRTV (Cameroon); ORTM (Mali) and RTS (Senegal).

Using its satellite downlink facilities and fibre network, Arqiva plays a large part in the enhancement of the most popular French speaking digital multichannel TV package in Africa.  From 4 February 2008, Canalsat Horizons not only offers a better signal quality on the African channels to its subscribers but also access to new TV Channels from Africa.

"I'm very glad that this collaboration with Arqiva is enabling us to offer subscribers in 20 countries a better quality reception for the African channels on the Canalsat Horizons TV package," said Jean-Christophe Ramos, general manager of Multi TV Afrique.

This new three-year contract capitalises on the increasingly important Arqiva infrastructure in France, which includes seven uplink/downlink C-Band antennas from 2.40 metres to 11 metres.

"We are delighted to see that our expertise and local infrastructure is helping Canalsat Horizons' digital multichannel TV package improve in transmission quality and increase Multi TV Afrique's sales potential, which should soon see its number of subscribers rise," comments  Denis Chambon, general manager of Arqiva in France.

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