[Satellite News 05-29-09] Nilesat hopes to have a new satellite up in May 2010 as it looks to bring new capacity to the severely constrained Middle Eastern market, CTO Salah Hamza told Satellite News.
    “We have had challenges with our fleet in terms of gaining new capacity. We aim to have our new satellite up in orbit in around May of next year,” said Hamza. “In the meantime, we have signed a leasing deal with Eutelsat, which means they will put a new satellite at 7 degrees West. We can lease this capacity to sell to our clients, so our lack-of-capacity issues are being solved.”
    Nilesat is far from alone in the region, Arabsat, Yahsat, and SmartSat also are aggressively targeting the market and hunting for new capacity. However, Nilesat may adopt a more cautious approach than its competitors. “We are quite a conservative company. We will not spend money unless we feel we can gain a return. I don’t know about Arabsat. We are in a different situation in the way we finance our satellites. We finance our satellites using our own resources. We are contemplating the next steps of our strategy,” said Hamza. “We are concentrated on the broadcast side. Others may work in different areas, broadcasting or other applications. We think there will be still be strong demand from broadcasters and other applications.”
    While broadcast-centered, Nilesat is hoping to play a more of a role in the nascent satellite broadband market in the region, especially when its new satellite launches. “The new satellite, which we launch next year, will have four Ka-band transponders. I hope that we can help provide broadband type applications with this type capacity,” said Hamza.
    Jawad Abbassi, CEO, Arab Advisors, believes this market will begin to see some traction in the region. “We think satellite-based broadband in the Arab world will be successful for a number of reasons. Firstly, the vast areas of territory in the region. For example, you have Saudi Arabia where you have the oil industry. Secondly, there is the marine industry, where they cannot connect to terrestrial in an effective manner. In case of natural disasters and emergencies, satellite will provide the redundancy needed. Thirdly, there is also the issue of censorship in many countries, particularly in a country like Saudi Arabia, where the terrestrial service is censored, and the satellite service is not censored. So there is also potential demand for satellite-based broadband services in those areas,” he said. 
    Over the next 12 months, Hamza predicted that Nilesat would continue to see the expansion of direct-to-home (DTH) services across the Middle East and that Ka-band based applications and a foray into IPTV are considered future challenges for the company. “We will try and market IPTV applications. IPTV at the moment is just about re-transmitting DTH services. But, there is a possibility for more sophisticated IPTV applications. We want to do more deals with telcos and broadcasters who want transmit their channels via IP,” he said.