Belintersat, Belarus’s national satellite communications operator, is in the final stage of testing tuta TV, a pay-TV platform set to fully launch in 2027. According to the state news agency BelTA, the service targets small villages, summer cottage communities and garden plots where terrestrial telecom infrastructure is thin.
Running cable or fast internet to those places is often difficult or simply not worth the cost, experts say. That’s exactly where satellite fills the gap, according to tuta TV project lead Oleg Vinyarsky. His colleague Andrei Yanovich, who heads Belintersat’s satellite ground applications center, pointed to cottage communities where getting a stable digital terrestrial signal means mounting an antenna on a mast up to 10 meters tall. That’s hard and unsafe for most people. A satellite dish, by contrast, installs the usual way and pulls the signal straight from orbit.
The core lineup will be Belarus’s free-to-air public channels, broadcast in HD. Vinyarsky stressed that the mandatory social package should be available to everyone, whether they live in a regional capital or a remote village. Satellite makes that possible, since its footprint covers the entire country. Beyond state channels, the lineup is set to add entertainment, sports, kids’ and music content, plus movies. Foreign channels will be included too, but only those officially licensed for broadcast in Belarus.
To pick the channels, the developers ran a large-scale sociological and marketing survey across the country’s regions. Having learned what people with limited TV and internet access actually watch, the team didn’t chase hundreds of channels, Yanovich explained. The priority was a compact package that matches what viewers want. The lineup may grow later, depending on what regular audience research shows.
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Pricing is already listed on the tuta TV website. The single plan costs 19.90 Belarusian rubles a month, or about $6.60 at the National Bank of Belarus rate on September 23. That buys more than 50 channels, over 20 of them in HD. The operator deducts the fee daily in equal installments, and the minimum top-up is 5 rubles.
Apart from the antenna, Belintersat lends subscribers the reception equipment free of charge. If the TV supports satellite reception, the kit includes a CAM module (a device that unlocks encrypted channels) and an access card. If it doesn’t, the operator adds a set-top box. Subscribers only need to buy the dish and its LNB converter themselves. The kit ships by mail or can be picked up from official partners, and customers can set it up on their own using the instructions or pay a dealer to do it. A subscriber registration form is already live on the site.
Under the hood, tuta TV runs on Belintersat’s existing infrastructure. Since 2023, the operator has used it to deliver the free-to-air channel package to businesses and cable operators. To serve individual subscribers, Belintersat upgraded its teleport, prepared subscriber receivers and rolled out a conditional access system that encrypts the signal.
The platform will broadcast from Belintersat-1, the country’s national geostationary communications satellite. Until now, the operator has used its capacity mainly for corporate work in foreign markets. Belintersat isn’t limited to geostationary orbit, though. In May, it signed a deal with Russia’s Bureau 1440 for access to low-Earth-orbit connectivity and testing it in Belarus.
Anyone will be able to sign up for tuta TV, city dwellers included, but areas with weak ground infrastructure will stay the priority. For now, the platform is being tested so that software, payment systems and customer support work smoothly together before mass sign-ups begin.
