A Seventh-day Adventist television station in Brazil has dramatically expanded its broadcast audience, launching Internet broadcasting that will run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.  Novo Tempo, which is already broadcasting by satellite and cable throughout South America and into Inter-America, began its Internet broadcasts April 8, making its program lineup of preaching, lifestyle shows, and seminars available worldwide to anyone with a computer and modem.

For station director Williams Costa Jr., the move to Web broadcasting was a natural step in the station’s development.  “People are hungry for spiritual things,” he says.  “Today, with all of this pollution and violence and crime, I believe it is much easier to speak our message about hope, confidence, grace, and mercy.  There is a lack of those things in the hearts of people.”

“Our message comes to fulfill human needs, that is my vision,” he adds. “And in this process, the media—the Internet, television, radio, newspaper—are instruments used by God.”

Novo Tempo (New Time), also known as ADSAT/Novo Tempo, aims to “provide a variety of programs to fulfill the needs of Latin America in both the Portuguese and Spanish languages,” says Costa.  In the past two years, Novo Tempo has both increased its satellite downlink sites and diversified its distribution methods. 

“Two years ago we had 850 satellite downlink sites,” says Costa.  “Now we have more than 4,000 in Brazil, 1,200 throughout the rest of South America, and around 800 in Inter-America.”

The majority of these satellite dishes are attached to churches, schools, and other Adventist institutions, each capable of holding between 300 and 500 people. But even these numbers don’t fully represent the total viewing audience, says Costa. “In Uruguay we have six downlinks, but one of these downlinks is connected with a cable TV company that hits 120,000 homes,” he explains.  “In Argentina there is another downlink site that’s reaching 60,000 homes. A site in Colombia receives and retransmits for 30,000 homes. In Brazil, there are 18 churches that receive the signal and retransmit to homes in an area of four miles around each church.”

Novo Tempo is also broadcast by TESCAT, a Brazilian cable television company.  Within the next two weeks, Novo Tempo’s signal will for the first time be made available to all TESCAT subscribers; up until now Novo Tempo has only been available at an extra charge.

As its audience has expanded, Novo Tempo has moved from primarily re-broadcasting programs that were produced elsewhere, to producing a greater number of programs in-house. Costa admits that it is a challenge coming up with some 160 hours of video material each week.  The station’s lineup features a mix of interviews, seminars, and pre-taped evangelistic programs filmed on-site in places such as Peru, Argentina, and Brazil.  He says the station is also developing a children’s show, and plans are underway for a cooking program.  Costa is already looking forward to the time when Novo Tempo will be able to expand its range of broadcast languages.

The station faces a number of difficulties, says Costa, including lack of space in their studio and increasing workloads for the six-member production and transmission team. But he says they are all “enthusiastic about the future because of all the possibilities that exist and because of the doors the Lord has already opened for us.”

Novo Tempo’s Internet broadcasts can be found at www.tvadsat.org.br.