Globecast provides playout and distribution for Mindset pop-up education channel during COVID-19

Johannesburg, South Africa, 21st July 2020 — Globecast, the global solutions provider for media, has announced that it has partnered with long-term customer and education content provider, Mindset, to create an additional pop-up education channel for children across Sub-Saharan Africa.

When lockdown occurred in South-Africa due to COVID-19, Mindset, an NGO working with government, institutional donors and corporations, saw the immediate need to create an additional channel to reach younger children. Called Mindset Pop, it features educational programming covering the entire General Education and Training (GET) phase, including Early Childhood Development (ECD), as well as a key focus on the Grade four – nine curricula (ages nine to 15). The channel was launched on April 1st and has been broadcasting since.

Melanie Gibb, Operations Officer of Globecast in Africa, said, “We have worked with Mindset for a long time and we shared their desire to get this channel on-air as soon as possible. We already had a suitable, light-touch playout workflow in place, with which Mindset is familiar, so we moved quickly to launch this initiative in a week and supply it for carriage on the Multichoice DStv platform. We are very proud to be able to help during these extraordinary times.”

Mindset accesses the virtualised playout technology remotely via fully redundant fibre connectivity supplied by Globecast. Mindset creates the content and the channel according to its schedule with the files then checked via the playout system. The SD channel, with full redundancy, is then encoded by Globecast and distributed to Multichoice over fibre.

Mindset’s CEO, Dylan Green says: “We are happy to be working with MultiChoice to spread academic excellence during the lockdown. Though we often focus on matriculants, the key concepts are taught at foundation phase. We are bringing a whole new and exciting world of learning to DStv subscribers everywhere. Mindset PoP is available to all subscribers across the DStv platforms in South Africa and Africa more widely. Viewers can tune into DStv channel 317 and get ahead with this fantastic education channel!”

“We are very proud that, through our partnership with Mindset, we have managed to bring the classroom into the homes of many DStv subscribers during the lockdown period,” says Aletta Alberts, Executive Head, Content Strategy at MultiChoice.