The first of the four regional general interest channels for North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany’s largest state, that were licensed at the end of last year, has started test broadcasts. NRW TV currently screens a test card within Deutsche Telekom’s digital package on Hot Bird 5 (13 degrees East), transponder 155 (11.604 GHz H, SR 27.500, FEC 5/6). Media authority Landesanstalt fur Rundfunk (LfR) had granted operating company NRW TV Fernsehen aus Nordrhein-Westfalen a satellite licence in October. LfR, which intends to fix the new cable allocation table for North-Rhine Westphalia’s cable networks in March can only consider channels that are on air, therefore the new regional TV services need to launch trial programmes until then. It is expected that some form of co-operation or even a merger between the four operators will take place as LfR has already indicated that only one sole analogue cable channel will be available to them.