Despite the moment of widespread economic crisis through that one lives in Europe, the vice-president of Eurosport, Jacques Raynaud, it aims that "it is a good moment to throw this service, we are in a year replete with big sports events, especially the Euroglass and the Olympic Games of Peking, which will be seen in HD", as he gathers The Country.

The sale of TV sets has grown 30 % in the last months", it adds. Also, he trusts that the birth of Eurosport HD serves "to impel the distribution of the HDTV and the number of subscribers to the chains of payment".

Raynaud sees the somewhat special Spanish market. "There is too much deport openly (soccer, motoring, motorcycling, basketball...) compared to other European countries, what tells that the payment television should not reach levels of six or seven million subscribers", he says.

On the possibility that Eurosport incorporates the TDT of Spain, as it is going to do from the first of July Disney Channel, Raynaud proves to be a butcher: "No, the Eurosport business model does not happen for the TDT, since the sport has a high cost that the European audio-visual industry cannot finance. The cartoon are much cheaper that, for example, the rights of a few Olympic Games, and the advertizing investment, other one of the possible financing sources, is deriving Internet". "There have been tries in Germany and Italy, but they have not stopped working", it concludes.


He bets for Euosport HD

The president of the Group Eurosport, Lauren-Eric Le Lay, makes sure that the target is also "to bring this incredible experience over to the biggest number of hearths equipped with the technology HDTV, as well as to all the countries in which Eurosport is expressed", in particular 59 countries with a potential hearing of 112 million hearths.

After being in tests for some days, the version in high Eurosport definition was opened officially for the whole Europe last May 25, as it aimed tivotoday.com (to see news) across the satellites Hot Bird 7th, Eurobird 9, Thor 5 and Hispasat 1C.



Eurosport HD

(SatCesc, 10/06/08)