African Telco gets into pay-TV.

London, Europe and Africa-based African communications provider Gateway Communications is giving couch potatoes on the desert continent reason to rejoice. The company has announced that it will launch a pan-African pay-TV service, dubbed GTV, in the middle of this year. It will be based in Kenya.

Sub-Saharan Africa is considered one of the least penetrated pay-TV markets in the world. The territory actually has the world's lowest take-up, with less than one percent of television-owning households subscribing to pay-TV. That compares to 36 percent in Western Europe and 93 percent in the U.S.

GTV will feature a monthly subscription fee equivalent to U.S.$20, designed to undercut the prices charged by MultiChoice for its multichannel digital satellite service, DStv.

Gateway is setting its sights on what it hopes will be a rapidly growing market, with 46 million television sets in use, and that number growing by more than 10 percent a year. The company expects subscription television to be worth more than U.S.$3 billion by 2015.

GTV will provide sports, movies, soap operas, music, education and religious broadcasts, and will focus heavily on African content, rather than simply rebroadcasting South African or European content (as Gateway has accused DStv of doing). The service will carry both major international channels and a number of"in-house" channels.

Its own channels will include G Prime, an entertainment and movie channel, and two channels that feature sports events.

Gateway executives have described GTV as targeting customers who have previously been unable to afford subscription-based services, and have been limited to a small number of national free-to-air television stations.