Canal+ Overseas chooses Enensys for TNT Africa regionalisation

Canal+ Overseas has chosen Enensys to provide technology for the rollout of its digital-terrestrial platform in Africa. The international arm of the Vivendi-owned pay TV company is rolling out TNT Africa, a multi-country sub-Saharan African project to complement its existing DTH service, Les Bouquets Canal+.

Enensys is supplying content insertion and regionalisation via its T2 Gateway product at Canal+’s Paris headend and T2-Edge systems at transmitter sites in each country.

Content will be supplied via the Paris headend, over satellite, to each transmitter site. This includes country-specific services and services for sub-regions in some countries.

Enensys’ technology will ill aggregate the content at the transmitter site in order to insert the regionalised content, which has also been supplied by satellite, for that country. The company says this ensures optimal use of satellite capacity.

TNT Africa is delivering content via DVB-T2 across a single-frequency network.

“Regionalisation is a key differentiator for DTT from satellite-delivered services, though this does require knowledge and specific technology to achieve. We do this using PLP [Physical Layer Pipes] aggregation. This is central to our network regionalisation systems,” said Emmanuel Jacques, sales manager, Enensys. “We were the first to be able to offer this cost-effective and precision local DVB-T2 insertion technology for regionalisation that’s suitable for SFN use. We have many years of experience with DTT deployments, including with MultiChoice’s GOtv in southern Africa, and we can handle the complexities of these projects, of which there are plenty. We are excited to be working with Canal+ Overseas on this major project.”