Asia Satellite Telecommunications (AsiaSat) has signed a new lease agreement with the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). This will give C-band more capacity on AsiaSat 2 and allow Asiasat to offer the EBU better transmission services of live sports and news events in Asia.

AsiaSat, the continent‘s leading provider of high-quality satellite services, claims in an official release that AsiaSat 2 has proved to be a very successful satellite gateway between Asia and Europe due to its extensive C-band footprint and the availability of turnaround facilities.

AsiaSat 2, a Lockheed Martin Series 7000 model, carries twenty 36 MHz and four 72 MHz C-band, as well as nine 54 MHz Ku-band linearised transponders. Its C-band footprint covers 53 countries embracing Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Australasia and the C.I.S. AsiaSat 2 also has a high-power Ku beam serving the Greater China region, Korea and Japan.

The EBU groups 70 national broadcasters from 51 countries in the region. It operates the Eurovision and Euroradio networks. It is also responsible for coordinating news and sports programming, besides actively promoting public service broadcasting.

The Union renewed its first lease of a full 36 MHz C-band transponder on AsiaSat 2 six months ago, using it to transmit regular and ad-hoc video contribution feeds between Asia and Europe. EBU had extended its Eurovision Network into Asia by signing the first lease on AsiaSat 2 a few years ago. Leasing additional capacity enables the EBU to strengthen the company‘s array of services as well as to increase the number of export feeds towards the Asia-Pacific region from Europe and other regions.

EBU‘s Eurovision Network is fully digital with a total capacity of 38 channels over Europe, six channels over Asia and 11 channels over the Americas. Eurovision Network boasts over 100,000 news items and 8500 hours of sporting and cultural events transmitted last year.

The Indian arm of the California-based animation and graphics workstation company, SGI, organised a seminar on 5 December at Hotel Le Meridien Mumbai focusing on interactive television and digital asset management. Australia-based SGI Media Commerce business development manager (Asia Pacific) Greg Doyle jetted down to India to highlight SGI‘s solutions around the ITV domain along with SGI India director marketing Avinash Fotedar.
The duo talked at length about SGI products such as the VOD (Video on Demand) and NVOD (Near Video on Demand) software and Media Servers which are mainly targeting media and entertainment enterprises including broadcast, cable networks satellite providers and telcos.

The duo says they offer asset management solutions with Media 360 using Ascential software which allows organisations to acquire, index, manage, track and store multiple media content targeting the Internet, educational institutions, government organisations, and for science and research

SGI media servers support most digital, MPEG-2, DVCPRO-25,and uncompressed formats, he reveals. These servers enable feed, acquisition, simultaneous ingest and play out-to-air multiple channels, ad insertions, digital news editing systems creation of play lists and also distribution between networked facilities. Costly satellite transmission and tape transfers are made redundant with this technology

According to Doyle, SGI has a vast range of products. Says he: "The range is limitless today. SGI servers enable a system to be scaled from two to 512 processors with up to 80GB per second of sustained I/O bandwidth, enabling a production system supporting thousands of digital video streams simultaneously," he points out. Wherever we do not have the complete know how , we tie up with established people to offer solutions, we have tie ups with Oracle Video server, Marconi, Streammaster from Motorola, Viagate technologies to name a few."

Doyle believes that there is a lot of potential for interactive television solutions in the Indian market. "We do not have any installations in India as yet, but we decided to hold this seminar to showcase our technology and gauge the response from industry."

But he adds that internationally, media servers have found a lot of acceptance, both in the US, Europe and Japan. Says he: "Tens of thousands of servers in the US play directly to air in cable channels in the US. In south-east Asia, a government telecom body in Taiwan has already acquired our NVOD and VOD servers at a cost of US$3 million. We feel that Taiwan ,China and India are the biggest markets for our technology today

He adds that SGI offers other solutions for weather prediction, mapping, science and technology, space, aeronautics, oil and gas exploration, graphics and designing.