ESPN Star Sports recently signed its first-ever terrestrial carriage deals in Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar with national broadcasters LNTV, TV5 and Mywaddy TV.
The deals will run for three years and include an agreement to air the English Premier League and other sports programmes. ESS has also concluded a carriage agreement with Vietnam‘s terrestrial national network, VTV3. Under this arrangement, VTV3 will broadcast, in addition to the English Premier League, exclusive ESS programs like the Asian X Games Qualifier in Malaysia in February 2002, the US X Games, the world‘s richest 5-a-side international football event Tiger 5s, and the CGU Asian Bowling Tour.

ESS programming was earlier available in the region through a combination of hotel and cable platforms, mainly to expatriates and tourists.

The EPL season began on August 18 2001, carried live on ESS‘ two channels, ESPN and Star Sports. This season, football fans across Asia will see 165 live games and over 1000 hours of EPL programming. In addition, there is a line-up of support news programming seven days a week, with a comprehensive menu of pre- and post-game analyses, predictions and information.

According to an official release, a potential 9.2 million viewers have been added to ESS‘s distribution figures, taking it up to a total of 79 million households on ESPN and 56 million households on Star Sports.

Scientific Atlanta has teamed with Telect to provide new fibre management solutions to help cable operators route and protect optical fibre throughout their networks. Increasing bandwidths for interactive TV services have necessitated protecting the optical fibre that carries high value traffic.
The new products help minimise potential outages, optimise signal quality, curb performance degradation and the consequent subscriber churn. The symbiotic relationship combines Telect‘s high performance optical fiber distribution and routing product lines with the leading network technologies and worldwide cable industry experience of Scientific-Atlanta. The fiber management products will be co-branded by the two companies, and Scientific-Atlanta, the world‘s largest provider of transmission network equipment will exclusively market these products to cable operators worldwide.

The new fiber cable management products include the ADF Advanced Distribution Frame - a breakthrough in high-density optical distribution technology. The ADF is the only frame on the market today that provides the recommended level of protection for high-bandwidth fiber driven by DWDM, L-Band, 3G wireless systems, and other emerging technologies. It also includes the E-Series Optical Distribution Frame that offers high-density, total-front-access fiber distribution and configuration flexibility in a compact, ETSI-compliant footprint. The E-Series can be configured with any combination of splice, patch or storage trays, that can be easily added to the cabinet without changing existing hardware, minimizing the risk of circuit disruption. There is also the WaveTrax Cable Management System, a totally enclosed, snap-together channel system offering complete physical protection for fiber optic cable. The robust WaveTrax design reduces the number of hangers, uses less hardware and requires fewer couplers and junctions, saving installation time and money.

According to an official release, Scientific-Atlanta‘s service arm, SciCare Broadband Services also helps customers design their architectures to route and protect their fiber investments. SciCare also provides a full suite of integration and installation services for Telect and Scientific Atlanta equipment. With experienced integration teams, SciCare can quickly provide cable operators with a state-of-the-art headend or hub facility that maximizes space efficiency and network performance.