Italy: JV to manage nearly 1,000 TV towers
October 8, 2019
From Branislav Pekic in Rome
3Lettronica Industriale and Prima TV have teamed up to jointly manage a network of nearly 1,000 DTT transmitters in Italy. The two partners will offer interested broadcasters the possibility of transmitting their TV channels in the new DVB-T2 standard.
Italy’s Ministry of Economic Development has already given its approval and assigned to the consortium one national DTT multiplex (number 11, broadcasting on UHF channels 23 and 24), which will be operational from June 30th 2022.
3Lettronica Industriale is owned by Italian telecom group WindTre, while Prima TV is owned by businessmen Tarak Ben Ammar with Naguib Sawiris as a shareholder.
WindTre brings in dowry about 130 repeaters while Prima TV has other 869. Significantly, Prima TV’s network (operated by DFree) reaches 95.6 per cent of the Italian population.
From September 1st 2021, all DTT broadcasters must switch to the MPEG-4 standard, the first step of a transition that will end in June 2022 with the switchover to DVB-T2.
The Ministry of Economic Development also decided that RAI, Mediaset and Persidera will each get 2,5 DTT multiplexes (instead of the current five), while Cairo Network, Premiata Ditta Borghini e Stocchetti (Telecapri group) and Europa Way (Europa 7) will each get half a multiplex.