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NIGCOMSAT Has Capacity Telecast Programmes, Says Official(AllAfrica Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Mr Danjuma Ibrahim, the General Manager, Satellite Control and Operations, Nigeria Communications Satellite (NIGCOMSAT), on Wednesday in Abuja said the organisation has the capacity to telecast programmes. Ibrahim told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) that NIGCOMSAT's mandate was to build a facility where individuals or organisations with programmes could come and buy space segment to air. What we have in our facility is like what obtains in DSTV. DSTV has a facility where it rents space segment from EUTELSAT and from INTELSAT. EUTELSAT and INTELSAT are satellite operators like NIGCOMSAT. So, what they do is to build a facility where if you have a programme, like anyone from Nollywood, you will then have a channel like Africa Magic or Kingdom Africa. These are channels owned by Nigerians. Those channels have programmes that run throughout the day, the people that own the channels are not the people that have those particular programmes. You can go and buy a whole channel and you have other people that will be bringing in programmes. They have given to them their time slots. If your own will be around nine in the morning, you will make sure that your programmes are there for them to be aired at that time. "So, what we have here is the HN (Home Network) facility. People can go and bring their programmes, content aggregators, buy channels and uplink them to the satellite and broadcast," Ibrahim said. He therefore urged individuals and organisations to bring programmes to NIGCOMSAT because it has the wherewithal to telecast them. The general manager said NIGCOMSAT has four-band facilities which enable it to uplift programmes into the satellite. Luckily for us, for NIGCOMSAT 1R (the replaced satellite) we have four bands. These are the C-band, KU-band, KA-band and an L-band. In the KA-band, we have coverage over Nigeria, South Africa and Europe. Nigeria is a spot beam, South Africa is a spot beam and Europe is a spot beam. You can use this particular one to broadcast over Nigeria. "So, if you get a programme, maybe from Europe, you can bring it here and from here you can uplift and broadcast. So, the DTH is a facility we can use on KA, KU, or the C-band to broadcast," he said. Ibrahim said the issue of tele-education and tele-medicine was that they were pilot projects which were used to testrun the workability of the first satellite launch. Those particular programmes were done in collaboration with NASDRA, which is a sister organisation and the Federal Ministry of Health. We ran a pilot project. We can really do that tele-medicine and tele-education. Even, during that time, the National Open University of Nigeria (NOUN) installed some equipment for us to do that particular project for them. "Presently, we are not running those programmes. But we have the capacity and the capability to do it. Only that we have not got the people to come and pay," he said. Copyright Daily Independent. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). |