SET in rolling fields 10 minutes from Winchester in Hampshire, the entrance to Crawley Court looks as if it conceals a cosy country hotel. Only the 45 giant satellite dishes visible halfway up the driveway spoil the view.

The largest dish is trained on a satellite hovering above the Indian Ocean, useful for beaming Premier League pictures to a growing Asian fanbase.

This is the headquarters of Arqiva, a company with a low profile but a big job. It is at the centre of the project to switch Britain’s television signal from analogue to digital by 2012 by replacing antennas on the 1,150 masts it owns.

If anything goes wrong, thousands could be stuck with blank screens in Olympic year, but Tom Bennie, Arqiva’s chief executive, is unfazed. “It is not really a technical challenge. It is a logistical challenge,” he said.

After completing work in the Borders region, using helicopters to lift parts into place to catch up on time lost to bad weather, work will start in November to bring digital to 2.7m households in the Granada region.

As the infrastructure owner, Arqiva is putting into practice the government’s plan to upgrade television transmission. The bandwidth that currently carries the signals will be freed up and will be auctioned off to new users.

Transmitting pictures and sound nationwide to television sets, radios and mobile phones is a steady business, explaining Arqiva’s attraction to Macquarie, the Australian investor that paid £1.3 billion to acquire it in 2005 when it was still a division of the NTL cable company.

However, Macquarie itself has been less steady lately. It recently raised £262m in a share issue to repair its balance after huge write-downs. The company’s debt level is too high and assets are being sold.

The Canada Pension Plan is buying MCG, one of Macquarie's listed funds, which owns 48% of Arqiva along with 50% of Airwave, which runs a secure phone network for Britain’s emergency services.

It is just as well Arqiva has already raised £700m to pay for the digital switchover, which will be paid back with interest from transmission contracts running as far ahead as 2034 with ITV, Channel 4 and the BBC.

Inside its main control room, 300 screens play out all the channels it collates, including regional opt-outs. They are sent up to the Astra satellite to be beamed back down to earth into BSkyB’s 9.3m homes. Two hundred miles further north, engineers at the Emley Moor mast in West Yorkshire pull together the channels that go out on Freeview.

Bennie has sought to inject some commercial urgency into an organisation that once laboured under a civil-service mentality. It breaks the terms of its transmission contracts if channels blackout for more than 52 minutes a year.

Arqiva traces its roots back to the engineering division of the Independent Broadcasting Authority, which was privatised in 1990. Macquarie folded in National Grid’s wireless arm (NGW) in 2007, paying £2.5 billion to unite for the first time all of Britain’s television masts in common ownership.

The creation of a monopoly was welcomed by broadcasters because they thought it was easier for one company to plan the digital switchover than two. They also saved transmission fees.

“The Competition Commission ensured that a lot of the benefits passed to customers,” said Bennie.

Arqiva is still hugely profitable.

Underlying earnings rose 1.5% last year to £127m, on sales of £461m. NGW would have added another £166m.

Changing television over to digital transmission gives it an opportunity to reinvent itself. Bennie sees Arqiva at the heart of media distribution across all platforms. That means it is likely to bid for slices of the television airwaves when they are auctioned off next year.

“It is something we would give consideration to,” he said.

Arqiva already controls a third of the channel slots on Freeview and may bid for SDN, another Freeview slots owner being auctioned by ITV. It is also taking control of Digital One, the national platform for digital radio, and Bennie thinks Arqiva is well-placed to build the network at the centre of the government’s smart electricity metering programme.

However, the biggest opportunity lies in mobile, after communications minister Lord Carter said wireless broadband could be used to make sure the whole of Britain is hooked up to the internet at speeds that can support video.

Transmitting mobile signals needs a greater number of masts than television because users are nearer the ground than television aerials and not fixed to one spot. Arqiva owns 9,000 mobile-phone masts - one in four - and has rights to build on another 18,000 city rooftops.

Bennie reckons that half of Britain’s mobile masts could be decommissioned if operators shared masts, although many more will need to be brought into service as mobile data traffic rises.

“The broadcast space has been run with shared services since the year dot,” he said. “There is a possibility that we could extend from being a site partner to be a full outsourcing partner for the mobile firms.”

From its sleepy rural base, Arqiva is ready to ramp up its role as Britain goes digital.

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