Satellite Uplinking
KINGSTON TARGETS 50% GROWTH P/A October/November 2001

The UK satellite uplinker formerly known as Kingston-TLI has just re-branded itself as Kingston Inmedia. The initiative comes from Inmedia's MD for the Gerrards Cross-based company, Nick Thompson, who joined Kingston from Loral Cyberstar.

This company has an impressive facility just outside London and has long-term uplink contracts for the likes of Sweden's Modern Times Group's TV Travel Shop - PIN channel, as well as old-established contracts to uplink TV signals for the British military personnel working overseas, formerly Services Sound & Vision.

But this is only the tip of Kingston's iceberg, which sees investment taking place almost all over the outfit's 140+ acre North-West London site. There is a new virtual studio, another being refurbished and a willingness from Kingston to now invest directly in enterprise start-ups. Thompson says KMS' broadcast side continues to increase, "and is still the mainstay of the business. We have recently put up a carrier onto Astra 2A. Indeed, we have doubled our business.

"We have a strong DTH business as well as a point-to-point business, and we are now looking at an enormous number of satellites from a farm of over 30 dishes. The occasional use business sector is also doing well, and I suspect we are benefiting from all the disparate businesses being helped by the coming together of the Kingston brand over the past year."

Currently, Thompson's division of Hull-based Kingston Communications is steaming ahead. In 1999 its turnover was just below £9 million. Last year it was £19.49 million, and just in the first three months of this year stood at £7.9 million.

Thompson says that the company expects that grow rate continue, adding that his Internet-based uplink traffic grew 96 per cent compared to last year. With this sort of growth in prospect, a IPO floatation cannot be far from Kingston Communication's mind, although Thompson quite properly declined to comment on any such forward-looking plans.

The growth is coming across the board, says Thompson, and manages to mention his old Alma Mater in the process, "Cyberstar has led the industry in Internet [satellite traffic] in Eastern Europe and the near Middle East, and has allowed itself to be driven to a commodity-based business model. What is crucial for us is to add some value and extra service for our clients. ISP's naturally want everything at the lowest-possible price and the way to achieve this is not to simply cut one's margins to the bone, or else that would lead to trimming the overhead to such a level as you would not be able to properly support the business.

"Instead we use technology to drive through-put, which delivers more volume at the same fixed cost, same bandwidth, same antenna. But more importantly allowing us to properly support the business. We are able to offer a complete ground service and infrastructure which is crucial. The easy bit is the point-to-point on the satellite circuit. Our solutions have been built to handle the commercial pressures of the internet, as well as the technical demands."

Inmediaô is targeting three specific areas. "First, broadcast services which is our traditional area including occasional use, point-to-point and DTH services," says Thomson. "As far as DTH is concerned it is where we provide the connectivity for clients. We do not see us in the retail market.

"The internet carrier market is second, best described as the backbone high-speed connectivity and typically reaching the sort of regions that terrestrial fibre has not, or may never, reach. We are also looking at internet applications that cover IP multicast, where you have a broadband service needing to get to the edge of the net.

"Our third area is the enterprise market, the corporate or business to business market, and we have created a network services group to handle this business, looking at multipoint applications, business TV, internet and intranet corporate needs and applications, video point of sale, WAN in the sky. This extends into what we might call narrowcasting. We were there in the analogue world, where there were higher costs, and we are there in the MPEG world, but now we have the IP environment and this is a very do-able business and we see this third company division growing rapidly. We are looking at new web-hosting contracts, storing and streaming out from here, as well as training and support."

Thompson says Kingston is winning contracts in the business to business sector despite heavyweight competition, and this includes work for SES Astra-Net service. In total Kingston plays out more than 50 TV channels.

KMS has already invested in digitised storage and playout facilities. They are playing out a number of channels already and they expect to see significant increases in that number. Thompson comments, "We see this as being our electronic warehouse, giving us extended playout capacity, adding Internet hosting applications as well as conventional TV facilities. We expect the co-location unit to be somewhat satellite-centric again, with some people being interested in physically being present at our site and also using some of the other facilities we can offer, not least the teleport.

"We like to think of ourselves as an international media gateway. We are spending money on this sort of expansion as well as continuing to invest in new antennas. We have new 7.6m and 9m diameter dishes and have commissioned a 16m dish for Intelsat at 62 deg East."

As for East-West visibility, Thompson says Gerrards Cross, their main centre, is excellent, "From here we are sitting we can see the West Coast of the USA across to the West Coast of Australia including South America where we have services as well as the Gulf, the Far East. In fact the whole five continents, but that's satellite communications!"