Horse and Country TV selects GlobeCast

Horse and Country TV (HCTV), the world’s first dedicated channel for the equine and rural affairs community, has selected GlobeCast to help expand its reach beyond the internet, managing and delivering its new Sky channel. Using GlobeCast’s capacity on the Eurobird satellite, HCTV will be available to Sky’s 8.4 million subscribers throughout the UK and Ireland from 2 July 2007.

The free-to-air channel was first launched as an online TV service in September 2006 and brings together a highly experienced team from the worlds of equestrian sport and broadcast. The HCTV team has designed a format to balance sporting events, documentaries, dramas and a range of children’s programming, as well as a wide selection of video on demand programmes and live sporting events.

GlobeCast’s unique solution for HCTV will include the use of GlobeCast’s fully-automated playout solution, before it is delivered via fibre to GlobeCast’s Technical Operations Centre in Brookmans Park. From here the signals will be multiplexed and uplinked onto Eurobird at 28.5 E to be positioned on BSkyB’s direct home service, Sky TV.

This newest addition to GlobeCast’s platform on Eurobird will join more than fifty video channels and eleven radio channels that GlobeCast hosts on the platform, including major television broadcasters such as EuroNews, Abu Dhabi TV, Extreme Sports, CCTV 9, Discovery, Audi TV and others.