MUMBAI: US sports broadcaster ESPN has struck a deal with GlobeCast, a global content management and delivery company, to deliver ESPN Classic, the company’s first UK-dedicated sports channel, to the Sky Digital platform.

Launched this week using Globecast’s capacity on the Eurobird satellite, ESPN Classic is devoted entirely to the greatest moments and legends of sport with a mix of all-time classic highlights, matches, movies, interviews, profiles and documentaries.

GlobeCast’s solution for ESPN includes connectivity from the broadcaster’s playout facility in West London to GlobeCast, where the feed is encoded, multiplexed then sent to GlobeCast’s Brookmans Park teleport for uplink to the Sky Digital platform using GlobeCast’s Eurobird capacity. ESPN Classic is available 24 hours a day on Sky’s EPG channel 442.

GlobeCast has an established relationship with ESPN Classic, providing a content and delivery services for the channel’s existing French, Italian and European feeds via Astra at 19.2ºE, Hotbird at 13ºE and Sirius 2 4.8ºE respectively.

Globecast is a subsidiary of France Telecom. It is a global content management and delivery company. Via its worldwide satellite and fibre network, the company manages and transports 10 million hours of video and other rich media yearly for its core customer base of broadcasters, as well as corporate, government and retail clients.

Globecast is network agnostic and ingests once to deliver content to any network via multiple platforms, including direct-to-home satellite, cable, video-to-mobile, IPTV/video-over-ADSL, desktop broadband, and more. The company's global presence includes 15 teleports and technical operations centres throughout Europe, America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Australia.