HD licences allocated

The CSA has announced the allocation of two licences for HD broadcasting on the DTT platform.
The licences have been allocated to commercial broadcasters TF1 HD and M6 HD who will provide services on the free-to-air HD platform.
A third HD/DTT licence was reserved for public broadcaster France Télévisions.
All three channels are expected to start broadcasting on the nationwide R5 Multiplex during the spring of 2008 using around 8Mbits/s each.
The CSA have also said that they will be offering a pay HD channel slot for bids before the end of the year and three further HD slots by the end of 2008.
The CSA is in the process of re-planning multiplexes to provide some of the extra space by switching to the more efficient MPEG-4 (H.264) compression instead of MPEG-2.
In total France will have seven HD DTT channels.
Main source: Reuters
Item added: 27th November 2007