Canalsatellite made a flurry of announcements at the Milia event in Cannes (February 14-18) concerning its interactive services. A service for betting on horse races is to launch in April, available to all subscribers to the basic service. When a subscriber tunes in to the horse-racing channel, now called Equida, an on-screen banner will invite him to place his bet. Bets, which may be placed until the start of the race, are paid for by bank card inserted in the secure card reader built in to the terminal

Claire Leprouste, head of interactive services at Canalsatellite, revealed numbers for the Piktorezo multiplayer game launched last November. “Over 10,000 games are played week and 15,000 ‘minimails’ have been sent to date,” she said. The minimails are a rudimentary form of e-mail between players of Pikto Rezo, with content like greetings and rendezvous for playing games. A fully fledged e-mail system is still awaited. The Canal group has around ten games which it has developed in co-operation with Infogrames, deployed on its digital platforms in various countries. Infogrames is currently working on porting Outcast, a highly successful PC game, to work on digital satellite terminals. Infogrames’ Christophe Comparain said that the game would be ported without degrading it, but admitted that it would be “a real challenge.”