Person holding TV remote control. Photo: Sat>IP

TIM, Broadpeak, and Eutelsat have been testing multicast signal distribution over a satellite network in Italy, the companies announced June 27. The testing, delivered through the TimVision Box in Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) multicast mode, was developed in collaboration with Eutelsat, which owns and operates the Konnect satellite dedicated to providing internet services in Europe and Africa, and with Broadpeak to use the nanoCDN solution for content distribution. TIM is the largest telco in Italy, and one of Eutelsat’s biggest telco customers in Europe.

Multicast functionality allows live events to be streamed without duplicating streams, providing high quality live coverage.

“The testing has shown that the benefits of multicast transmission in terms of quality and network resource savings are also available with the use of connectivity via satellite. This means that live content can be streamed, even at 4K resolution, with the same quality as a fiber connection, without restrictions linked to the number of simultaneous viewers,” Crescenzo Micheli, TIM’s head of Technology & Innovation, said in a statement.