StarSat (formerly TopTV until 31 October 2013) is a South African

direct broadcast satellite Satellite television is a service that delivers television programming to viewers by relaying it from a communications satellite orbiting the Earth directly to the viewer's location. The signals are received via an outdoor parabolic antenna comm ...

television service that began broadcasting on 1 May 2010. StarSat is operated by On Digital Media, who were granted a pay-TV license by

ICASA The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) is an independent regulatory body of the South African government, established in 2000 by the ICASA Act to regulate both the telecommunications and broadcasting sectors in the publ ...

in September 2007. On Digital Media is currently 20% owned by Luxembourgish satellite operator

SES SES, S.E.S., Ses and similar variants can refere to: Business and economics * Socioeconomic status * Scottish Economic Society, a learned society in Scotland * SES, callsign of the TV station SES/RTS (Mount Gambier, South Australia) * SES S.A., ...

and 20% owned by Chinese company

StarTimes StarTimes is a Chinese electronics and media company with strong presence in Sub-Saharan Africa. StarTimes offers digital terrestrial television and satellite television services to consumers, and provides technologies to countries and broadcas ...

. StarSat's service is aimed at the LSM 6-9 demographic, targeting middle class viewers.

History

On Digital Media (Pty) Ltd launched TopTV on 1 May 2010. On 30 April 2013, shareholders of On Digital Media voted to approve China-based company

taking over a 20% share of ODM. By doing so, StarTimes effectively acquired a 65% economic interest in ODM. The vote also included adoption of a business rescue plan. TopTV was officially rebranded as StarSat on 31 October 2013. The new packages and channels associated with the new brand were made available on 1 December 2013.

Broadcast and Reception

StarSat services are broadcast via satellite, using the

SES-5 SES-5 (also known as Astra 4B and Sirius 5) is a commercial geostationary communication satellite operated by SES S.A. It was launched on 9 July 2012. The launch was arranged by International Launch Services (ILS). History In October 2008, ...

satellite at the 5° east orbital position, and 3 of the six 36 MHz transponders in the "Sub Saharan Africa Ku-band" beam providing coverage of the whole sub-Saharan Africa region. Transmissions are in the

DVB-S2 Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite - Second Generation (DVB-S2) is a digital television broadcast standard that has been designed as a successor for the popular DVB-S system. It was developed in 2003 by the Digital Video Broadcasting Proje ...

MPEG-4 MPEG-4 is a group of international standards for the compression of digital audio and visual data, multimedia systems, and file storage formats. It was originally introduced in late 1998 as a group of audio and video coding formats and related tec ...

digital TV format with reception using a simple

set-top box A set-top box (STB), also colloquially known as a cable box and historically television decoder, is an information appliance device that generally contains a TV-tuner input and displays output to a television set and an external source of sign ...

and with the Combo3 PVR decoder launched in 2011.

Conax Conax develops television encryption, conditional access and content security for digital television. Conax provide CAS technology to pay TV operators in 85 countries. The company has offices in Norway (headquarters), Russia, Germany, Brazil, th ...

is used as

conditional access Conditional access (CA) is a term commonly used in relation to software and to digital television systems. Conditional access is that ‘just-in-time’ evaluation to ensure the person who is seeking access to content is authorized to access the c ...

system.

References

External links

*
On Digital Media website

StarTimes website
{{DEFAULTSORT:StarSat Mass media companies established in 2010 2010 establishments in South Africa Television stations in South Africa Television in South Africa Direct broadcast satellite services Mass media in Johannesburg

History

Broadcast and Reception

See also

References

External links