India‘s next generation communication satellite Insat-3C, which was originally scheduled to be launched in September, will not be placed in orbit before January at the earliest. And that is dependent on it‘s getting space aboard Arianespace‘s Ariane 5 rocket.

The failure of Ariane 5‘s flight 142 to reach a proper orbit on July 12 led to the indefinite suspension of further Ariane 5 flights as a seven-member independent inquiry board went into what went wrong. The panel, which submitted its report to Arianespace on 1 August, notified all its customers, including the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which had launched the Insat series on French Ariane rockets.

The summary of the findings state that the malfunction was due to a combustion instability at the ‘EPS‘ upper stage ignition due to the abnormally high pressure gradient in the combustion chamber.

The return-to-flight program for the Ariane 5 is moving ahead at present with more than 60 ignition tests of the Aestus upper stage engine having been performed on a test rig in Germany. The data will be used in determining the new ignition sequence.

Modifications of the Aestus engine test rig will be made to validate flight conditions during the ground-based static firings. To allow these modifications to be carried out, and to provide time for the upper stage‘s qualification, the Ariane 5‘s next flight is now targeted for January 2002, Arianespace CEO Jean-Marie Luton has said.

Arianespace at present has a backlog of 50 payloads to be launched, which include 41 satellites and nine ATV missions for the international Space station. This is for both its Ariane 4 and 5 series.

The 1,170 kg Insat-3C will provide fixed satellite services (FSS) in the normal and extended C-bands, as also broadcast satellite services and mobile satellite services in the S-band.

Insat-3C will replace India?s current workhorse, Insat-2C, whose capacity will be transferred to the new bird. Insat-2C is expected to reach the end of its seven-year life span in another six months.

The launch of Insat-3C will be the first phase of ISRO?s efforts to add more than 50 transponders to its capacity, ISRO chairman K Kasturirangan had told a conference of V-SAT service providers some months ago.

The demand for V-SATS is expected to increase from the 14,000 currently in operation to 20,000 in the next couple of years with broadband V-SATs coming in with new technology.

Insat-3C has cost ISRO $40 million. In addition, it is paying $77 million to Arianespace as launch costs.

Bitstream Inc. and NDS Group plc have have entered into a long-term, large volume contract to license Bitstream‘s Korean stroke-based font for use in NDS‘ digital broadcasting systems deployed by SkyLife in Korea.

SkyLife is the first and exclusive satellite broadcaster in Korea, and hopes to reach 3 million pay-TV subscribers by 2005.

The first set-top box vendors have been selected by SkyLife, and integration of Bitstream fonts and NDS middleware and conditional access systems is ongoing. Humax Co. Ltd., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., and Hyundai Digital Technology Co. Ltd. are all committed to delivery of digital set-top boxes to SkyLife by the end of the year, a joint release says.

"We are excited to expand our long-term relationship with NDS and to offer a high-quality Korean font to SkyLife," said Anna Chagnon, President of Bitstream yesterday. "This is a tremendous opportunity for Bitstream. With its small footprint and fast rendering speed, including the fastest TrueType rasterizer on the market, Font Fusion and stroke-based fonts are ideal for digital broadcasting systems, where quality text rendering on screen is of critical importance. We are excited by SkyLife‘s endorsement of our stroke-based font as the standard for digital satellite broadcasting in Korea."

Sue Taylor, Vice President and General Manager, NDS Asia Pacific, said, "The combined strengths of Bitstream and NDS are a proven solution. In China, we have shown that our combined solution reduces the hardware requirements of the set-top box, consequently reducing the overall cost of the set-top box."

NDS will supply the Open VideoGuard conditional access system, NDS Core middleware, StreamServer for the management control of the digital headend, and provide consultancy for set-top box integration.

NDS and SkyLife will work with Korean set-top box manufacturers to incorporate Bitstream‘s Korean stroke-based font into their solutions. NDS licensed Font Fusion from Bitstream to use as NDS‘ font rendering technology for rendering high-quality Korean characters on the fly.

Bitstream‘s stroke-based fonts are extremely compact, high-quality Asian fonts for embedded systems. These fonts enable developers to keep storage and memory requirements to a minimum. For example, a Korean font in this format includes over 17,000 characters in less than 400 KB. Developers do not have to dedicate a large amount of ROM space to store a stroke-based font, nor do they have to use a lot of memory to display it.

Many developers, including ANT, Liberate, NDS, Quadriga, and Samsung, are using Bitstream‘s font technology to build cable, satellite, and home entertainment systems for digital television.

Font Fusion provides developers with full font fidelity and high-quality typographic output at any resolution on any device, while maintaining the integrity of the original character shapes. Font Fusion is small and fast. Most developers can compile the source code in 32-105 KB, depending on options. It generates more than 16,000 characters per second, using the Arial font at 25 lines per em on a 233MHz Pentium(r) II processor, cache turned off.

Font Fusion performs well in memory- and performance-constrained environments. For example, a complete traditional Chinese TrueType font with over 13,000 characters can occupy as much as 8MB. With Font Fusion, the same characters occupy less than 0.5MB, representing considerable savings in memory and disk space costs.

Font Fusion is designed for operating systems, software applications, Web applications, low-resolution screen devices, multimedia servers, high-definition television screens (HDTVs), set-top boxes, continuous tone printers, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and other embedded systems and information and wireless appliances.

After the the relaunch of Zee TV in India, there has been a complete makeover of Zee UK as well.
Zee UK took on its new avatar from 1 October. Although its FPC has all the new Zee shows running in India there are some shows which are specific to Zee UK.

Among these is a new interview based show Encounter that goes on air from the 7 October airing on Sundays and a woman‘s show entitled Sangini that begins airing from 17 October Wednesdays & Fridays.

Net4India, India‘s leading and the single largest domain name registration company in South Asia, today announced that their customers can now own a dot INFO domain name. .INFO is the first top level domain after .COM, .NET and .ORG in over a decade and will allow classification of information on the the web.
INFO is poised to change the way information will be categorised and will allow companies and individuals to classify information further. It will also give an opportunity for corporates to book domains which may not have been available with a .com, .net or .org extension and use it to build their online presence. .INFO is available to corporates and individual‘s on a "first come first serve" basis.The other six high-level domains announced are .biz, .name, .co-op, .pro, .museum and .aero.

Speaking on the occasion Jasjit Sawhney, CEO Net4India said: "Dot INFO is truly an opportunity to reach the world wide audience for the next phase of Internet‘s evolution. It will help in bringing an element of classification on the Internet making it easier for customers to access information. We expect that out of the two lakh domian names booked this year 15 per cent will be .INFO."

Worldwide the anticipated demand for domain names is expected to reach over 40 million by the end of 2001, with sustained growth expected for 2-3 years.