Lattelecom Announces New-Generation TV

The Latvian Cabinet of Ministers decided today that Lattelecom will be the provider of digital terrestrial television programming. The company’s management and employees welcome the fact that the government has thus appreciated Lattelecom’s professionalism and technological capabilities.

Latvia is one of the last countries in Europe to introduce new-generation television. The priority for Lattelecom in the context of this major project will be the television audience. Terrestrial broadcasts will be based on state-of-the-art technologies so that local residents don’t end up having to pay for modernisation at some point in the future. The latest technologies for next-generation TV will include the MPEG-4 format, and that will be cost-effective from the very beginning.

“Lattelecom has the necessary experience, because right now we’re the only ones in Latvia to offer one of the most progressive TV solutions in Europe. We’ve offered Lattelecom Television for the past two years. It offers a high level of image quality, more than 50 channels, and the ability to watch shows presented over the previous five days,” explains Lattelecom’s commercial director, Jānis Ligers.

“Changes are always accompanied by fears which are related to a lack of knowledge, and so one of our priorities will certainly be to inform the audience about the chance to watch TV in a new format while still enjoying free television channels. We will particularly be focusing on poor families and older people.”

The new-generation television programme will offer free and fee-based channels. All domestic television channels will be presented for free, because that is the law. Lattelecom agrees that such channels must remain free. Other than that, Lattelecom plans to offer as many as 80 TV channels so that local residents can choose content in accordance with their interests and abilities. The first new-generation TV viewers will be in RÄ«ga. The services will then be offered in Kurzeme, then in Vidzeme, and finally and simultaneously in Zemgale and Latgale.

There won’t be cables or complicated communications systems in this process. Lattelecom is already forming partnerships in support of new-generation television on a terrestrial basis. Complicated engineering and technologies would mean delays in the introduction of the new service, and it would mean substantially higher product costs for the user. Lattelecom has instead come up with a solution which guarantees that all that people will need will be a stationary antenna and a decoder. People with modern television sets won’t even need that, because the latest models receive the signal without any additional equipment.