Bharti Selects TANDBERG Television MPEG-4 AVC IP Head-End for Indian DTH Satellite Launch

Deploys advanced technologies to create world leading DTH infrastructure

Southampton, UK — TANDBERG Television, part of the Ericsson Group, today announced that Bharti Telemedia, a subsidiary of Bharti Airtel Ltd., has chosen its market-leading advanced IP head-end for the launch of a new Direct to Home (DTH) satellite TV service in India. Bharti Telemedia’s state-of-the-art DTH system will use a range of TANDBERG Television’s proven solutions including the iSIS 8000 IP head-end and MPEG-4 AVC standard definition encoders. The system is one of the first satellite DTH platforms in the world to benefit from the compression efficiencies of standard definition MPEG-4 AVC, significantly increasing transponder capacity and potentially doubling the amount of available channels.

“We are excited to be deploying such advanced technology and infrastructure to offer a best-in-class DTH service to our customers. To launch this service we needed more than a technology supplier, we looked for a television partner. TANDBERG Television was a clear choice as the company brings a strong combination of market-leading IP and MPEG-4 AVC technology, coupled with more than a decade of experience of enabling some of the world’s largest DTH satellite operations,” says N Arjun, Executive Director, Bharti Telemedia.

The DTH services will be launched nationally across India and Bharti is setting up a state-of-the-art infrastructure near Gurgaon (Haryana) for the purpose of uplinking and broadcast. By using the latest MPEG-4 AVC video compression, and IP technologies, Bharti can cost-effectively deliver more channels in less bandwidth, while still maintaining high quality pictures.

“We are proud to have been selected to provide the video head-end infrastructure for such a prestigious project. The launch of Bharti’s DTH services will add tremendously to the operator’s existing bouquet of integrated communications. By using our state-of-the-art IP and advanced compression technologies Bharti is able to deploy a world-class, future-proofed infrastructure that will enable it to deliver a high quality customer experience that can scale, cost-efficiently as the service grows,” says Roger Bolton, Executive VP of Compression Solutions at TANDBERG Television.

Advanced IP infrastructure

At the heart of the Bharti head-end is the TANDBERG iSIS 8000 which includes best-in-class video encoding, IP multiplexing and new receiver/decoders. The system is brought together under a single control and management system, nCompass. The TANDBERG MX8400 IP Multiplexer, is a next generation DVB-S2 ready solution which will provide Bharti with an open standards, IP based head-end with support for up to 4 independent multiplexed outputs from a single unit. The combination of Reflex statistical multiplexing and this advanced multiplexing architecture ensures maximum usage of available bit-rate.

Further bandwidth efficiencies are achieved by the use of the TANDBERG EN8030 MPEG-4 AVC SD encoders, based on the company’s next-generation compression platform. The TANDBERG EN8030 use a comprehensive tool-set of advanced compression video processing features, combined with new pre-processing techniques. Itdelivers the industry’s leading picture quality versus performance through bandwidth improvements of up to 50% over traditional MPEG-2 based DTH services.