Business
Fiji Television's Regional Plans
It hopes to beam Sky Pacific into the region
It settled on the latter and found that the by-product of this was that
it could also extend its services to Fiji's island neighbours. "We bought a full transponder from supplier New Skies Satellites, 77 MegaHertz of bandwidth, and we are using it for the 12 channels we are providing," Fiji TV chief executive Ken Clark said. - ADVERTISEMENT - He said there had been a lot of controversy during the planning stages of the project about the number of channels that amount of bandwidth could support. "Some advisers said four channels max. Other people said with 77MHz we should be able to get 25 channels in there. "We had to arm wrestle with our technical advisers and suppliers to determine what was sensible for the introduction of an expanded pay television service and we settled on 12 channels," Clark said. The transponder can also support eight stereo audio channels and Fiji TV is looking at the option of leasing these to broadcasters like the Fiji Broadcasting Corporation and Communications Fiji Limited for the distribution of their radio services. The make-up of the 12 television channels, including the expanded pay TV service called Sky Pacific, had not been finalised at press time. But company board chair Olota Rokovunisei said it would include the free-to-air service of Fiji One, movie and sports channels, a children's entertainment channel, news and information services, Hindi language programming and documentary and natural history channels. Some channels being considered are the Discovery Channel for natural history and documentaries, Nickelodeon for children, and MTV for music entertainment. "The new pay television service will offer three tiers of programming," Clark said, "six channels on the basic tier for $49.99, four more on the second tier and a pay-per-view service as an additional extra. "The second tier service will offer a choice of either two extra channels for a total of $59.99 or four extra channels for a sum of $69.99, depending on which channels the viewer might like to have." The pay-per-view option is one-off: "If you want to watch a blockbuster movie next Saturday, you can pay $15 or $20. "It may be the Supper Bowl or a boxing match, but it will happen once," Clark said. Having the dedicated transponder allows signals to be focused on Fiji. "This is important because it means viewers in Fiji, Samoa and Tonga can all receive our signals on a 90-centimetre dish," he said. The 90cm dish, a sat-top box to de-scramble the satellite signals and a smart card to keep track of account payments will cost $599. But as you move outwards, the signal strength decreases to the extent that in Vanuatu you will need a 2.5-metre dish and in Rarotonga a three-metre one. The relatively small dish sizes have also been made possible by Fiji TV's use of Ku-Band satellite signals. The C-Band alternative would have required larger satellite dishes because of the comparatively weaker strength of C-Band signals. Clark said although they would provide technical support to viewers in Fiji, they were conducting an educational process for those who choose to do their own installation or who live beyond the "reasonable territory" of the service department. "We will teach people how to install their equipment, how to look for basic difficulties and we will issue a booklet with the dish so that people with fundamental technical skills will be able to look after ordinary difficulties." Fiji TV is not expecting its move into the Pacific to have an immediate effect on its advertising revenue. "We think it will have almost no impact. In our business plan, we did not rely on extra advertising revenue," Clark said |
