Space Systems/Loral, a provider of commercial satellites, today announced that it has been awarded a contract to provide two high-power satellites to Intelsat for Direct-to-Home (DTH) television service in Latin America. The two satellites will be operated by Intelsat, which will provide them to DIRECTV Latin America, a DTH digital television services operator in Latin America.
"The new satellites will help us support our customer's expansion plans in this region of robust economic growth with all the bandwidth necessary for today's most advanced television services" - Thierry Guillemin, SVP and Chief Technical Officer of Intelsat.
"The DLA-1 and DLA-2 satellites fuel the already stellar growth of the DIRECTV business in Latin America for new HDTV services, and provides full fleet redundancy for the reliability of these services for our customers" - Rômulo Pontual, DIRECTV Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer.
The Ku-band payloads will be used to expand DTH entertainment offerings and provide backup and restoration services. The two satellites are scheduled for launch in 2014 and 2015, respectively, and will be co-located with Intelsat's Galaxy 3C satellite at 95 degrees W.
