Tandberg Television’s operations are based on the progress of multimedia technology delivery methods. In the last year, the company has made notable steps in advanced compression systems, on-demand and content distribution solutions that are used by some of the world’s leading broadcasters, operators and programmers.

Tandberg closed 2008 with a series a series of impressive contract wins. SK Broadband, South Korea’s second largest broadband provider, chose to deploy Tandberg’s Television IPTV headend, which includes high-definition (HD) and standard-definition (SD) MPEG-4 AVC encoding. This solution will enable SK Broadband to launch linear broadcast television services in 2009 with 30 SD and 10 HD channels initially.

Tandberg kicked off 2009 with a content delivery deal with Starz Entertainment intended to promote Tandberg’s next-generation MediaPath system as a non-linear distribution platform. Lisa Hobbs, Tandberg’s vice president of business development is leading the charge to market MediaPath as a multimedia platform, capable of delivering voice and data over efficiently managed transmission streams.

Via Satellite spoke with Hobbs about the delivery system, the bandwidth capacity and efficiency issues that dominate conversations in broadcast sector, and the reality of a video content industry-wide transition from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 compression.

VIA SATELLITE: It seems that you are pushing MediaPath as a multimedia content delivery system that goes beyond video, but your target customers are mostly video-on-demand providers. How do you plan on expanding beyond this market?

HOBBS: We are trying to make the market understand that while the next-generation MediaPath has, to date, been used solely for distribution of VOD (video-on-demand) content, any non-linear content can be distributed using that mechanism. Non-linear content includes advertising, music and games, which we are interested in distributing. The first system was very specifically geared toward cable VOD specifications. This system is much more open and we do want more customers and perspective customers to understand that if they have any type of non-linear content that needs to be distributed to many different locations, that MediaPath is in fact, a viable option for them.

VIA SATELLITE: Does Tandberg have the bandwidth capacity to manage all of this content?

HOBBS: Our plans to roll out with a diverse content distribution platform centers on how efficiently the company manages its bandwidth. Tandberg is managing satellite transmissions with a two-fold solution that yields 20 percent to 30 percent more bandwidth efficiency. The first part of that system is DVB-S2 modulation technology, which not only allows for more bits to be packed into the same bandwidth but also creates increased margins on the satellite link. If our customers have been operating on the edge of a satellite link, they can give themselves more of a buffer to make sure they maintain their signals.
The second part of the system is an optional add-on dubbed Prekor, a digital pre-correction technology. When you just use DVB-S2 technology, and especially if you use the higher-order modulation schemes, what you end up finding is that there are distortions on the satellite transponder. Non-linearity is then introduced to the transmission. Those non-linearities can translate into a reduction in the amount of bits available for use. So we can linearize the transponder for the transmissions as a digital pre-correction. It is something that is only done on the uplink. It doesn’t impact any downlink receiver at all and also adds to the increased efficiency of the transmission.

VIA SATELLITE: Some broadcasters, especially in the cable sector, have said that transitioning from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 is costly. What are the issues that need to be solved in order to make MPEG-4 a reality for cable broadcasters?

HOBBS: Transitioning from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 affects programmers and broadcast networks differently. For programmers, whose target audience is U.S. cable headend sets that can only handle MPEG-2 transmissions, the transition can be expensive. From a technology perspective, the switch to MPEG-4 saves the programmers money, but it means that a more expensive receiver device at the headend will need to transcode that video from MPEG-4 back to MPEG-2 so that the cable operators can use it. If they are targeting a telecom headend and they are already using MPEG-4, they won’t have that same issue.

For broadcast networks, the transition problems are a little easier to solve. Because of all the local content that has to be inserted into the stream and then re-encoded at the station level, it is a little bit easier because they always decode back to an uncompressed signal anyway. So from their perspective, they simply needed a new receiver to be sent out. Consistency of signal quality is the biggest concern for broadcast networks as well as maintaining what they consider to be true broadcast quality so that the consumer at home would not be able to discern any difference whatsoever in the video quality before the transition to MPEG-4, as opposed to after

VIA SATELLITE: Will the transition be easier for telecoms and programmers?

HOBBS: For the telecoms, issues over what bit rate is coming over satellite and whether that bit rate can be used by the telecom become a concern. They would have to figure out what kind of trans-rating has to be done to lower the bit rate if necessary. Programmers are having to weigh the financial savings from potentially using less transponder capacity for the same amount of data by going to MPEG-4 versus the higher cost of the headend for the receiving equipment.

VIA SATELLITE: What developments will we see from Tandberg in terms of HD content delivery methods?

HOBBS: In October, we released a new cable HD program transcoder that enables programmers to harness bandwidth efficiencies of MPEG-4 AVC HD and DVB-S2 satellite distribution, the RX8250. PEG-4 AVC HD content can be cost-effectively converted into high quality MPEG-2 HD streams at the cable head end. It is an HD distribution solution which enables content providers to carry six to eight MPEG-4 AVC HDTV channels on a satellite transponder. This represents a doubling in the number of channels to be carried per transponder compared to some of the top-end MPEG-2/DVB-S HD satellite distribution solutions out there. The RX8250 also overcomes the legacy barrier to MPEG-4 AVC HD content for operators whose cable networks have a large installed base of MPEG-2 HDTV set-top boxes by enabling efficient transcoding of MPEG-4 AVC/DVB-S2 distributed content into high quality MPEG-2 HD.