I can just assume that the greek spotbeam was far too tight so that many subscribers of OTE TV (that have left the country and reside now anywhere in Europe) would complain up to give up their subscription. Personally I am very glad for this decision since I neither like spotbeams nor frequency reuse. This will lead sooner or later to paid (illegal) IPTV services since nobody will accept this artificial borders made by some greedy companies. Anyway, enough of that.
I've heard that theory for the Greek beam a few times and looking at the beam it certainly does seem to be a possible explanation for the increased coverage. It does seem like quite a lot of effort, cooperation and expense (both in monetary terms and frequencies in Greece and Germany) just for some "illegal" viewing though. I'm not a fan of frequency reuse either, especially if the channels I want are on the other side!) but from the satellite operator's point of view reuse makes a lot of sense to maximise bandwidth and revenue across Europe.
Here's a copy of the map of all the original beams that Eutelsat released some time ago before they made the changes that I originally posted when 9B was first announced. I stuck them together so it was easier to see which beams could share frequencies. Before the Greek beam was modified it could have easily have shared frequencies with the German beam. I just noticed now that the German beam has also been extended east from the original plan. I guess that since they couldn't reuse frequencies on those two beams they might as well expand both.
The Italian and Nordic beams seems almost identical to the ones originally published and of course we got a new wider German Ge that wasn't shown initially.
