(30 September 2006 6:00 pm)

MUMBAI: Tandberg Television is looking to build on its business and technology lead in the Asian IPTV video head-end market.

It demonstrated its full suite of live, on-demand and interactive solutions at the recently concluded IPTV World Forum Asia 2006 in Shanghai.

The event gave delegates the chance to see why the annual IPTV leadership report, published earlier this month by the Multimedia Research Group (MRG), ranked TANDBERG Television as the leading IP video head-end supplier in Asia, as well as in EMEA and rest of world.

Worldwide Tandberg Television says that it has been involved in more than 160 xDSL and FTTH deployments and there are over 2 million subscribers currently viewing IPTV thanks to the company’s technology.

Tandberg Television’s executive VP and GM, Asia Pacific Graham Cradock says, "Asia has always been a very important market for us. According to research from In-Stat the Asia-Pacific IP video services market will grow nearly 80 per cent per year between now and 2010, with Asia accounting for half of all worldwide IPTV subscribers by the end of 2009. We’ve been working with IPTV operators in the region for over five years and our market-leading technology is allowing telcos to deploy IPTV services right across the continent, from Dubai to Osaka and from Delhi to Shanghai."

Tandberg Television will showcase its fully integrated IPTV head-end product line, which provides the industry’s widest selection of encoding and video processing technologies for streaming, transrating, transcoding, ultracompression and high density encoding. The company came to IPTV World Forum Asia following its launch of next-generation high definition (HD) and standard definition (SD) MPEG-4 AVC encoding solutions at IBC 2006.

The move continues the firm's momentum in the MPEG-4 AVC arena and brings a step change in digital video distribution by combining the broadest choice of density and enhanced features with the industry’s leading 'picture quality versus performance' through bandwidth improvements of up to 50% over currently deployed MPEG-4 AVC units.

The firm adds that uts next-generation encoding solutions enable expanded telco TV business models, including the delivery of 2 full-resolution HDTV channels over ADSL2+@2km. The next-generation compression platform is being launched simultaneously across the Tandberg encoding family with the introduction of the new EN8030 MPEG-4 AVC SD and EN8090 MPEG-4 AVC SD/HD ultracompression broadcast encoders, alongside the introduction of new MPEG-4 AVC HD and SD ultracompression encoding modules for the Plex range of high density, multi-channel encoders.