The Media Network for the Future: Introducing Galaxy 30

By Kurt Riegelman, Intelsat’s Senior Vice President of Sales, Marketing and Communications 

Whether your household was cheering ‘Roll Tide!’ or ‘Go Dawgs!’ last week, you were one of the 28.4 million people benefiting from Intelsat’s North America Galaxy Fleet, the most efficient media distribution system in North America.  Last week, Intelsat announced the first in a series of orders that will see this fleet replaced with a third generation of technology that will bring advanced media distribution capabilities to television programmers in North America. This is the beginning of a multi-satellite investment program that will offer our customers a technology path for media distribution throughout the next decade. Galaxy 30, which represents the first of many satellites to be built under our North America fleet replacement plan, demonstrates our commitment to ensuring C-band services continue to be the go-to media distribution technology for years to come.  Here’s why:

1. Our satellite fleet simultaneously delivered the National College Championship game to millions of homes in America. No other technology allows consumers to simultaneously watch programming that is ‘five nines’ reliable, with the highest quality and without annoying buffering issues. This is why preserving C-band spectrum is vital and we are committed to ensuring our customers can continue to provide quality programming without fear of interference from wireless services. During the past 30 years, we have continually upgraded our fleet capabilities as our customers delivered analog channels, which then transitioned to digital standard definition formats, and ultimately established the first high definition video neighborhoods on Intelsat’s Galaxy platform. With Galaxy 30, we continue this evolution by pairing higher satellite performance with our unmatched penetration of US cable headends. This allows the delivery of UHD content to current cable distribution platforms as well as new distribution platforms such as OTT and multichannel video programming distributors. Intelsat leads the way in deploying increased performance, economics and accessibility.
2. Galaxy 30 demonstrates our unwavering commitment to preserving the quality and reliability for which our C-band programming distribution is known. When we filed our market-based proposal for joint-use of C-band in conjunction with Intel last October, we stated two key objectives: create a solution that assures the continued use of C-band in video distribution and accelerate the adoption of technologies that will advance new content outlets, such as 5G. Galaxy 30 provides tangible proof of our assertions that we will not compromise on the certainty, reliability and quality of the satellite services we provide; that satellite must remain primary in the C-band frequencies; and that any joint-use of our frequency must be implemented in a way that provides controls to ensure interference-free distribution.

One thing remains certain. Change in the broadcast industry is constant and accelerating exponentially while new types of content and distribution platforms are being created. By partnering with our customers to deploy increased performance “in space” as well as enacting logical frequency allocation policies “on the ground,” we can help our programming clients provide their customers with top-quality service, and secure and grow revenues today and tomorrow.