(27 June 2007 7:54 pm)

MUMBAI: Tandberg Television, part of the Ericsson Group, has been chosen by ESPN Star Sports (ESS) to provide the advanced video compression head-end for the world's first MPEG-4 AVC contribution and distribution (C&D) system.

The deal will enable the sports broadcaster to more efficiently distribute its programming to cable head-ends across Asia and to manage its satellite transponder usage.

ESPN Star Sports senior director engineering Andy Rylance said, "As Asia's number one sports content provider having the best possible picture quality is critical to our viewers and a primary driver in our business and technology decision making process.

"The bandwidth savings and transponder efficiencies of MPEG-4 AVC are economically attractive and as a leader in the broadcast industry in Asia, we wanted to take advantage of this new technological development as an early adopter. ESPN STAR Sports is confident that Tandberg Television's MPEG-4 AVC encoders can deliver us with the picture quality we demand. We are pleased to be working with Tandberg Television on this exciting roll-out."

The contract will see the deployment of a new Tandberg Television video head-end, including EN8030 standard definition encoders, at ESPN Star Sports' 73,000 square-foot state-of-the-art production facilities and earthstation in Singapore. The EN8030 is Tandberg Television's next-generation SD advanced encoder and combines enhanced features with the industry's leading picture quality versus performance through bandwidth improvements of up to 50 per cent over currently deployed MPEG-4 AVC units.

The EN8030 is setting new bandwidth benchmarks thanks to a number of innovative features. These include improved motion estimation processes, single slice video processing architecture, dedicated processing for low resolution encoding of picture-in-picture services, and a number of performance boosting features such as multi-pass analysis and enhanced video pre-processing which are the basis of 12 new patent applications, states an official release.

Tandberg Television Asia-Pacific EVP and general manager Graham Cradock said, "We are delighted to be working with ESPN Star Sports to achieve another industry first in advanced video compression. ESS is an early adopter of digital TV technology on which it has developed a world-class viewer experience. The use of MPEG-4 AVC will not only bring operational efficiencies to ESS' C&D network, but it will create an opportunity for the introduction of more channels and services."