LONDON — GlobeCast and Japan International Broadcasting, Inc. (JIB) announced that NHK WORLD HD has launched on the Sky and Freesat platforms in the U.K. GlobeCast provides re-encoding, uplink, and capacity on Eutelsat’s EUROBIRD™ 1, bringing the channel to a new community of more than 10 million Sky subscribers, and over a million Freesat viewers. Available on Sky EPG channel 507, NHK WORLD HD is a 24/7 English language channel produced by JIB and NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, fed live from Tokyo. With two of the world’s three largest economies located in Asia, NHK WORLD TV delivers a unique geographic and cultural perspective on important developments in this highly influential region. The recent crisis in Japan resulting from its greatest natural disaster proved the value of NHK WORLD TV and provided an invaluable service to people throughout the world. “The live video coverage of the earthquake and tsunami displayed the power of HD television extensively,” said Hatsuhisa Takashima, president and CEO of JIB. “Now we are able to make this state of the art technology and powerful English language news coverage available to the television viewers in the U.K. through our partnership between GlobeCast and JIB.” JIB, a subsidiary of NHK, is the exclusive distributor of NHK WORLD HD throughout the world. NHK has newsgathering operations throughout Japan, Asia, and elsewhere around the world, including 30 international news bureaus. GlobeCast already provides turnaround and satellite capacity for NHK WORLD TV in standard-definition format, as well as delivering NHK WORLD in HD on a number of IP platforms in Europe.