Since 1995 EUTELSAT, as well as other service providers (in Europe and worldwide), in collaboration with industrial partners and research institutions have been developing digital platforms for providing multimedia services as well as data broadcasting via satellite services. These digital platforms are based on the same technologies as those used for the emerging digital television and radio services, namely Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) and MPEG-2; a specific DVB standard should be finalised by the end of 1996. These platforms will greatly improve the speed of multimedia services to the end user (e.g. up to 2 Mbit/s per session on an Internet connection) and will provide the possibility of downloading very large files in a very short time (e.g. downloading speeds of up to 40 Mbit/s per transponder) to a very large number of customers. By using the same technology as for digital television and radio, large economies of scale are foreseen, thus making these digital platforms very affordable on both the unlink side and the receiver side (e.g. less than $300 for the DVB-PC card kit).
