KVH Media Group, part of KVH Industries, Inc., added several new titles to its NEWSlink portfolio with the launch of four new daily editions – Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro – focusing on the Balkans region.
Each title covers the main daily political, general, financial, sporting and entertainment stories from those countries, and is available in the native language, namely Romanian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Montenegrin. The new titles join NEWSlink’s roster of daily and weekly newspaper digests, which are currently available to seafarers and cruise guests on more than 8,500 vessels around the world.
The Balkan editions are standard four-page newspapers delivered seven days a week, following the style of most of the 100+ currently published NEWSlink titles. All NEWSlink titles are produced in NEWSlink newsrooms located in Liverpool, Delhi, and Manila, where a near 24-hour news monitoring service ensures the most current information is included in every edition.
KVH Media Group delivers the NEWSlink titles in a range of formats and through a range of technologies, and specializes in compact formats for maritime and other industries where bandwidth is limited or delivery costs are high. The Balkan editions will also be available later this year on KVH’s ground-breaking IP-MobileCast content delivery service, which utilizes multicasting technology to deliver content via a vessel’s broadband connection without affecting the vessel’s data speed or airtime plan.
“The Balkans area provides a large proportion of the world’s seafarers and whilst we have covered these countries with our English-language versions, we are again responding to feedback from our customers that providing crew with news from home in their own language goes a long way to make them feel more connected to life back home,” said Mark Woodhead, managing director of KVH Media Group. “As we reach the second anniversary of the ratification of MLC-2006, we remain focused on key welfare requirements for seafarers, and believe that sometimes it’s the thoughtful but important touches such as providing a daily news service, that can sometimes make a big difference for many seafarers away from home for months on end.”
