Starmax HD, Spain's New HDTV Platform, Launches With GlobeCast

PARIS — Starmax HD, Spain’s new HD service, has chosen GlobeCast to provide aggregation, encryption, and delivery of the full bouquet of channels broadcast to millions of households across the country. Hailed as a significant innovation in pay TV, Starmax HD has been developed from the ground up to provide the best HDTV platform to Spanish viewers in an accessible, affordable package without requiring a contract or minimum term.

GlobeCast’s end-to-end service for Starmax HD includes fiber contribution from several countries; reception of SD and HD channels at the company’s Sainte Assise Teleport in France; signal compression in MPEG-4 with multiplexing, uplink, and satellite capacity; and encryption for Conax.

“Even though more than half of Spanish households have HD-compatible technology, most Spanish consumers are not enjoying HD content to the fullest extent,” said Maciej Sojka, Starmax HD managing director. “As a groundbreaking platform, Starmax HD will change the way we watch television.”

In addition to GlobeCast’s content management and transmission services, the Starmax platform uses set-top boxes from Ferguson, and viewer access cards from Conax. Starmax viewers will have the ability to record programs and play content files from external hard drives, as well as Internet access to streaming content through the set-top box.