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New BBC channel on 13E?

(September 2007)

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HA
harshy Founding member
I was channel hopping and found BBC Arabic on 13E, but at present its showing a testcard and it says BBC Arabic, is this actually going to be a TV channel?

Here's the testcard

http://en.kingofsat.net/jpg/bbc-arabic.jpg
DE
deejay
Yes. Don't know the launch date, but the BBC is launching a television channel in Arabic. If that sounds a bit familiar, then yes, such a channel did exist in the mid 90s! Then it was part of BBC Worldwide and was in cooperation with a foreign partner. It closed partly due to a row over editorial content from said parter AIUI. This time it's being run by the BBC World Service.
HA
harshy Founding member
deejay posted:
Yes. Don't know the launch date, but the BBC is launching a television channel in Arabic. If that sounds a bit familiar, then yes, such a channel did exist in the mid 90s! Then it was part of BBC Worldwide and was in cooperation with a foreign partner. It closed partly due to a row over editorial content from said parter AIUI. This time it's being run by the BBC World Service.


Yes the transponder identifier says BBC World Service on it. It must be launching soon I guess.
OV
Orry Verducci
Sounds right, as Hotbird 13E seems to cover Arabia. I know other Arabic channels are on 13E including Al Jazeera's collection of channels, which I can pick up here.
HA
harshy Founding member
Orry Verducci posted:
Sounds right, as Hotbird 13E seems to cover Arabia. I know other Arabic channels are on 13E including Al Jazeera's collection of channels, which I can pick up here.


yeah same here, apparantly this channel was announced in 2005, ready to be launched this autumn, it will be interesting to see the TV presentation side of things.
BB
bbc140
BBC seems to have a news progaramme already; News

What channel is this broadcast on? or just internet,

bbc140
LE
lewsnews
Interesting use of blue and music from the BBC World Service, I wonder what it will look like when it is all put together as that from what it appears maybe some more music from the World Service could be used?
LL
Larry the Loafer
I apologise for my lack of the know but what exactly is 13E?
TV
TVdaz
That's the name of the satellite, I believe (Hotbird 13E). Doesn't the 13E refer to being 13 degrees East?
DE
deejay
There is a bit of the original World Service Television Arabic channel on youtube:
Channel Ident, announcement and News titles
Ident, announcement, titles and introduction, edited

It was clearly closely related to the international news bulletins in English made for BBC World Service Televisison, one channel of which was aimed at Asia and the other at Europe. These two channels were relaunched as BBC World and BBC Prime respectively, while BBC Arabic soldiered on until around 1996.
IT
itsrobert Founding member
TVdaz posted:
That's the name of the satellite, I believe (Hotbird 13E). Doesn't the 13E refer to being 13 degrees East?


Yes, the Hotbird collection of satellites is positioned at 13 degrees East.

I'll have to do a rescan on my receiver to pick this up ready for launch. Thanks for the tip-off, harshy.
NG
noggin Founding member
The BBC have been recruiting for an Arabic TV service - run by the BBC World Service under government funding NOT by BBC News under licence fee or BBC Worldwide funding. They have also been recruiting for a Farsi service as well AIUI.

The Arabic service is due to launch soon - I guess that the 13E bars are a holding signal for the uplink until a barker is ready.

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