[Satellite TODAY Insider 12-09-10] Softel hopes to follow up a deal with Bulgarian DTH operator Bulsatcom with more deals in Central and Eastern Europe.
    Softel announced Dec. 6 that it had signed an agreement for Bulsatcom to install Softel’s Swift TX subtitle/caption management and delivery solution to provide accurately synchronized DVB bitmap subtitles for its turnaround services to various European countries.
    Sam Pemberton, Softel’s CEO, told Satellite Today Insider that the company wants to do more deals in the region. “The migration towards digital and HDTV in Central and Eastern Europe is presenting Softel a great opportunity to work with local systems companies and broadcasters for the provision of subtitle creation, repurposing ingest and transmission systems. We are also working in several other important areas such as in Teletext, opt- and ad-insertion cuing, and interactive TV,” he said.
    Pemberton believes the deal with Bulsatcom demonstrates a path for Softel. “The real-time retransmission and resynchronisation of existing subtitle streams at DTH digital broadcast operations is core to Softel’s strategy of offering highly capable, cost-effective subtitle processing solutions for multi-channel, multi-standard digital broadcasters. Softel’s technology partnership with Bulsatcom’s video compression supplier, Ericsson, lead Bulsatcom’s CTO to ask Softel to engineer a specialist solution which was accepted and commissioned well within the project timelines,” he said.
    Softel derives a significant part of its revenues from the DTH sector, and Pemberton cites a strategic review undertaken just before the recession as key to Softel flourishing during this period. “We focused on overhauling our product portfolio to ensure we were well aligned with key industry trends and drivers. Our products group has also worked hard to architect our solutions to make them seamlessly integrate with third party systems. Overall, the change program allowed us to take a pragmatic and considered approach to the changes we made in the period and enabled us to avoid kneejerk changes due to the recession. We have, therefore, continued to invest heavily in our technologies throughout the recession. This has put us on a strong footing for the future.”

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