TANDBERG Television Debuts iPlex™ UltraCompression Transcoding at Telco TV

High density transcoding solution increases picture quality while simplifying system architectures

ATLANTA — At Telco TV 2007 (booth #711, Georgia World Congress Center, October 23-25) TANDBERG Television, part of the Ericsson Group, will show its award-winning iPlex™ UltraCompression IPTV video processing platform and debut its high performance integrated transcoding capabilities for the first time in North America. The new iPlex UltraCompression transcoder furthers TANDBERG Television’s market leadership in the IPTV space. It supports multi-format MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC SD and HD input streams and uses TANDBERG Television’s best-in-class next generation AVC platform to transcode them to either MPEG-4 AVC SD or HD output.

Up to 4 UltraCompression transcoders are supported in the 1RU iPlex video processing platform, giving the iPlex market leading density. By supporting transcoding, the iPlex video processing platform ensures the integrity of metadata in the transport streams (closed captioning, teletext etc.) and maximizes the performance of lip sync issues with subtitles. Additionally, when used in conjunction with bulk descrambling receivers, the iPlex transcoding architecture reduces the cost of the overall head-end design and improves video quality.

‘Building on the success of the iPlex UltraCompression platform, our transcoding capability sets a new industry performance benchmark. It offers an elegant and cost-effective way for service providers to take advantage of the bit-rate savings associated with MPEG-4 AVC while using either MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 AVC compressed programming from content providers,’ said Ian Tapp, senior vice president, business development, TANDBERG Television, Inc. ‘The integrated approach in the iPlex not only simplifies system architectures, but also enables the increase in IPTV picture quality that we know our North American customers want.’

The TANDBERG Television integrated transcoding solution offers a variety of advantages over disparate, multiple unit solutions. It converts an incoming HD or SD MPEG-2 transport stream to digital baseband, avoiding the composite video interconnection common in multi-box approaches, performs pre-processing for picture and compression optimization, and then encodes the stream into MPEG-4 AVC on a single submodule. The integrated design allows for increased signal processing control, in turn significantly increasing the compression performance. Also, ancillary data such as Teletext and Closed Captions is left intact, allowing the solution to conform with country-specific requirements.

With more and more HDTV operations using MPEG-4 AVC systems, the UltraCompression transcoder also provides the simplest solution for MPEG-4 to MPEG-4 rate conversion by enabling the operator to take this new content off-air and adapt it to the needs of their IPTV network.

Picture-in-Picture (PiP) images are also generated alongside the main video stream. Increased density lowers a service provider’s upfront equipment costs, eliminates cabling, reduces power costs, improves overall system reliability and minimizes rack space.

About iPlex Video Processing Platform

The TANDBERG iPlex is a flexible video processing platform, rather than just an encoder chassis, and offers the industry’s most comprehensive IPTV head-end video processing solution. The system includes MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC SD and HD encoding, trans-rating, transcoding, and picture-in-picture (PIP) service generation, all packaged in a high density, NEBS-certified, telco-designed chassis.

Since its launch in March this year, the iPlex UltraCompression has won four major industry awards, demonstrating the value the iPlex delivers to telcos. It was given ‘Best IPTV Head-end & Video Processing Technology’ at the IPTV World Forum in London; an IEC InfoVision Award at BBWF in Asia; a CSI Product of the Year Award at IBC for ‘Best Digital Video Processing Technology’ and an IEC InfoVision Award at BBWF in Berlin earlier this month.