3 minute read
Bringing you the world’s TV and radio
from BBC MONITOR 33
One of BBC Monitoring’s major offerings to its customers is reporting from a large number of broadcast outlets in dozens of countries. Our Broadcast Reception (BR) team works with colleagues in BBC Engineering to provide this service by exploiting our unique reception infrastructure. Dave Keeler reports.
The arrival of autumn in the northern hemisphere brought a reminder that satellite broadcasting is truly remarkable. Many channels lost signal for a few minutes each morning in the weeks after the autumn equinox. At that time of year, solar radiation overwhelms the signals of satellites orbiting 22,000 miles above the equator as they pass in front of the sun. The last time we saw these “sun outages” was in March, just before the spring equinox.
Aside from those regular but natural interruptions, the past year saw the BR team regularly updating the channel line-up available to Monitoring staff to keep across news events, while maintaining constant coverage of vital sources. Those with the highest priority are received in diverse locations to mitigate sudden signal losses.
Our unique reception infrastructure
Palestinian channels
Various Palestinian channels were already in our channel list when Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023. We then kept a close eye on them in case they went off air or changed content.
Hamas’s Al-Aqsa TV did both, firstly being dropped from a Eutelsat satellite on the orders of the French media regulator Arcom in October 2023. It then went through some rebranding before being replaced by a channel bearing the logo of the defunct Hamas-affiliated Shihab News website, then reappearing on a Qatariowned satellite, Es’hailSat2, until that stopped in June 2024. In August, Al-Aqsa re-appeared on Eutelsat’s 8 West B satellite.
Jamming and hacking
BR also tracks deliberate signal interference. Last spring, we saw evidence that Russia had renewed its campaign of jamming and hacking against Ukrainian channels. On one occasion, in April, Ukrainian programmes were replaced with Tucker Carlson’s interview with Putin.
On 9 May, Russia and Ukraine hacked each other’s TV broadcasts. Russia interrupted Ukrainian TV to show that day’s Victory Day parade in Moscow, while Ukraine cut into Russian TV’s coverage of the parade to play out a video comparing Putin’s Russia to Nazi Germany.
Dish farm in Cyprus
Alongside antennas in the UK, our dish farm in Cyprus is an increasingly useful asset. We use it to receive more than 45 television and radio channels from 12 countries, many on satellites that are not visible in the UK, and feed them back to London.
Cyprus is currently our main reception site for Iranian state TV and radio, with resilience provided by signals picked up in the Georgian capital, Tbilisi. It also allows us to receive Russian-controlled channels that broadcast to occupied parts of Ukraine, while avoiding disruption from Ukrainian jamming.
Those are just a few examples of how the BR team has been flexible and responsive in its provision of channels.
In the past year we have also taken extra Arabic, Chinese and Indonesian outlets to produce bespoke work for BBCM customers.
