shortWWWave

The BBC have started a publicly funded Arabic language international TV service, which is freely available on satellite and cable within the Middle East and North Africa.

Currently it will broadcast for just twelve hours a day, from 1000 UTC to 2200 UTC, but the intention is to run a 24-hour service later in the year. Funding for the station is from a government grant and savings made by closing the BBC World Service's Eastern European radio services.

The station's website can be found at bbcarabic.com.

A few weeks ago we reported that DW-TV had appeared on Intelsat 8. Now, as rapidly as it appeared, it has now gone. This leaves Asiasat 3S as the only satellite through which DW-TV can be received in Australia and New Zealand.

The South African Broadcasting Corportation today launched their new international news television station, SABC News International. The station will broadcast English and French news, from an African perspective, twenty-fours hours a day and is intended to compete on the same ground as BBC World and CNN.

It is currently available on the Intelsat 10, via Sentech's Vivid platform, which covers sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Europe. The station's schedule is here.

The station's website claims to have live internet streaming, however all we could find were recorded news broadcasts, in RealVideo format.

Source: SABC News

Australia's newest television station, National Indigenous TV launched yesterday in Alice Springs and Sydney, with a charter to reflect the culture of Australia's indigenous people. Initially, NITV will broadcast via the Optus Aurora remote satellite television service and commercial broadcaster Imparja's spare channel, but has future plans to become a third national broadcaster, via pay television operators and channel "A", which the Australian government plans to auction off at some point in the future.

Source: ABC Radio

Links

• NITV Advertisement


• National indigenous TV station launched in Australia -- Media Network


• The Future of Indigenous Television in Australia

As reported in the Austech forums, DW-TV, the international television service from Germany, is now available free-to-air on Intelsat 8, on a frequency of 12726 MHz, with broadcast beam covering Australia.

DW-TV broadcasts in both German and English.

The closure of Finland's YLE shortwave transmitters at the end of last year left Radio Sweden as one of only two major shortwave broadcasters remaining in the nordic countries (the other being Iceland's infrequently heard RUV.

Radio Sweden broadcasts in fifteen different languages, including English. The station is part of the Sweden's publically owned radio corporation Sveriges Radio (SR). In addition to Radio Sweden, SR operates a number of national and local Swedish radio networks; P1 is the national talk, news and documentary station; P2 plays classical and jazz music; P3 is the national youth broadcaster, playing popular music and P4 consists of 25 local talk stations. Sweden also has a large Finnish speaking minority, and SR caters to them with Sisuradio.

All SR's domestic stations are streamed online here. For those people running Linux who have trouble with their stream-player interface, they have also provided direct links to their stream addresses.

Radio Sweden programs are also available as podcasts, in English, German and Arabic. Swedish programs are available through the extensive Podradio pages.

Sun Apr 15 21:15:08 2007
Observer: "After the crackle, pop"

An article in today's Observer newspaper compares today's internet radio stations with the variety available on shortwave in years gone by. A good read.