DUBAI, 3 January 2003 — Le Royal Meridien Beach Resort & Spa has installed the first-ever satellite international news kiosk in the Middle East. Distributors the Jashanmal Group estimate that there will be 50 kiosks in the UAE by the end of 2004. The kiosks operate like an ATM, with customers inserting their credit cards into the machine and an international paper coming out of the slot 120 seconds later. Each publication is priced $3.95, and is the latest version available from the country of origin: content is downloaded from a satellite and printed out. “Believe it or not, the Internet is not the quickest solution available to us. It also has its own challenges — a lengthy download time and content that was up to a day old,” said Bharat Jashanmal, director of the group. “But satellite technology has really revolutionized the system: entire papers take 120 seconds to download at the most, and the content is the very latest edition of the international paper — wherever it is printed in the world — and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” he added. The kiosk has access to 114 titles form 47 countries, many of which are not distributed in the Middle East.