NOVA Greece

NOVA Greece
Industry Telecommunications
Founded December 1999
Headquarters Athens, Greece
Area served
 Greece
Key people
 Panos Papadopoulos (CEO)
Products Direct broadcast satellite
Increase€150.0 million (2014)[1]
Number of employees
 340 (2014)
Parent Forthnet
Website nova.gr

NOVA Greece is a Greek digital satellite pay TV platform owned by Multichoice Hellas. It was launched in December 1999.

NOVA offers Greek subscribers an array of international and domestic programmes (including news, sports, movies, music, children's programmes and general entertainment channels) plus the majority of popular Greek terrestrial TV channels along with a number of Greek terrestrial radio stations. International programmes are offered in their original soundtrack, with Greek subtitles. Some interactive services like games, cinema & theatre listings, lottery numbers, news headlines and weather reports are also provided.

On April 14, 2008, Greek telecommunications company Forthnet acquired Netmed, parent firm of NOVA Greece.[2]

In 2010, Nova Greece had 363,679 subscribers.[3]

In March 2012, Nova Greece had 391,252 subscribers. HD service counted 52,968 subscribers in 2011, an 86,8% rise from 28,356 subscribers in 2010.

In the end June 2015 the platform had 509,088 subscribers, while one year later, June 2016 it had 460,252 (-9,6%).[4]

In August 2016 the OTE TV platform surpassed Nova Greece subscribers number, by reaching 462,000.[5]

In July 2017 it was referred that NOVA Greece had 430,000 subscribers.[6]

Technical information

Nova broadcasts in standard definition using the DVB-S MPEG-2 format and (since September 2010) in high definition using the DVB-S MPEG-4 format through Hotbird 8 satellite at 13°E.[7] The service is encrypted with Irdeto conditional access system. Until recently the subscribers had the option of buying a specific set-top box, or using any DVB-S Irdeto enabled set-top box, but since September 2009 new subscribers are only allowed to use the company's own set-top box. This change of policy has raised some significant controversy.

Nova has also introduced a PVR service, accessible only through a (different) specific set-top box. This service requires an extra subscription fee but also provides the subscriber with the option to watch two different channels on two different TV sets in the same household.

Nova channels were also available through the IPTV service of On Telecoms. On Telecoms]subscribers could sign up to watch all the channels offered by Nova but had to pay a separate fee for that service.

Digital satellite receivers

Nova Satellite Package includes digital satellite receivers manufactured by Pace. The current models are NovaBox HD 831 and NovaBox HD PVR 865. Older models were Panasat 1110, Panasat 910, as well as the older Panasat 720i, Panasat 700 and Panasat 642, manufactured by Panasat.

Channel list

NOVA Greece currently has over 50 subscription channels in its line-up, from Greece, Europe and abroad as well as access to over 200 FTA channels. The line-up also includes over 100 radio stations, and most are available FTA.

Criticism

It is said by most television enthusiasts in Greece that the sum of Nova's characteristics show that total customer satisfaction is not by any means comparable to that of subscribers of other European satellite providers, like SKY Italia, Sky UK or Sky Deutschland.

Degradation to the picture quality due to extensive use of heavy MPEG compression (a technique that offers more available programs at the price of lower total image quality per channel added) also affects terrestrial repeaters and that practice seriously degrades picture of all commercial national television stations nationwide, since they are fed by Nova.

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.