Europesat - Satellite TV for a fragmented continent

The Europesat system is conceived as a multibeam TV transmission system covering the territories of all 25 signatories of the Conference of European Postal and Telecommunications organizations. Of the two coverage plans thus far developed, the preferred solution provides seven separate beams, each of which is targetted at a 'major' country or group of countries; smaller states would receive service from overlapping beams. The seven target areas would be (1) the Nordic countries, including Iceland and Finland; (2) the UK; (3) Italy; (4) West Germany; (5) Iberia; (6) France; and (7) Greece and Turkey. The baseline proposal is to furnish a total of 20 TV channels, to be divided among the various spot-beams.