[SatNews] Two new satellite builds have now been contracted for... Space Systems/Loral (SS/L) has been awarded a contract to provide two high-power satellites to Intelsat for DTH television service in Latin America. The two satellites will be operated by Intelsat, which will provide them to DIRECTV Latin America, a leading DTH digital television services operator in Latin America. Thierry Guillemin, SVP and Chief Technical Officer of Intelsat, said, "The new satellites will help us support our customer's expansion plans in this region of robust economic growth with all the bandwidth necessary for today's most advanced television services."

"The DLA-1 and DLA-2 satellites fuel the already stellar growth of the DIRECTV business in Latin America for new HDTV services, and provides full fleet redundancy for the reliability of these services for our customers," said Romulo Pontual, DIRECTV Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. "By working closely with Intelsat and SS/L, DIRECTV has been able to leverage the spot-beam frequency reuse technologies to greatly expand the capacity into Latin America with the industry's best technology. The cooperation of these three powerful companies has produced a powerful architecture for our business."

The Ku-band payloads will be used to expand DTH entertainment offerings and provide backup and restoration services. The two satellites are scheduled for launch in 2014 and 2015, respectively, and will be co-located with Intelsat's Galaxy 3C satellite at 95 degrees West. The two satellites are designed based on the decades proven Space Systems/Loral 1300 platform and the first is scheduled to launch in 2014. They are contracted to provide service for a minimum of 15 years.