Thomson products and technologies have been shortlisted for a number of awards to be presented at IBC2007, including IABM Design Awards, Cable & Satellite International Product of the Year Awards, and the IBC Innovation Awards.
Placed on the shortlist for the IABM Design Awards is the Grass Valley LCP 400 wireless local control panel software from Thomson. The LCP 400 software is a radical new approach to camcorder control. A software application running on a Windows Mobile device, it links to the Infinity Digital Media Camcorder via Bluetooth and, as well as offering realtime control of the camera functionality, it gives access to the metadata to allow information about the shoot to be read, written, and edited.
The decision by Thomson to develop a custom chip, Mustang, to power high performance MPEG-4 compression systems is recognised in the first of five nominations for the Cable & Satellite International Product of the Year Awards. In the category of best HDTV technology, the new ViBE EM3000 HD MPEG-4/H.264 encoder appears on the shortlist of three.
The best content-on-demand solution nominations include the Thomson Sapphire video-on-demand server - already the market leader in Europe - in conjunction with the Thomson SmartVision service platform, which simplifies the management of value-added functionality like content on demand.
With mobile television rapidly moving from trials to commercial deployments, many operators are turning to Thomson to deliver an end-to-end mobile television system, including content preparation, encoding, multiplexing, and streaming. Thomson can also provide the transmitters for broadcast solutions such as DVB-H and MediaFlo. The third CSI Product of the Year nomination for Thomson, therefore, is for best mobile television technology.
In the category for best customer premises technology, the Thomson ACG 900 is an embedded multimedia terminal adaptor, combining a DECT cordless phone with an entertainment and communications hub.
Finally for the CSI Awards, the Thomson DBI200 set-top box is shortlisted for the best content security technology product. It incorporates the NexGuard™ video watermarking technology, the first such STB to work with standard and next generation compression codecs including MPEG-2, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) and VC-1, allowing IPTV operators to create highly secure, forward-looking solutions.
In IBC‘s own Innovation Awards there is a nomination for The Digital Facility, an integrated network environment for the ingest, management, distribution, and storage of media files. Grass Valley broadcast equipment is cited as one of the principal technology partners for the NOB CMF project. NOB Cross Media Facilities is a part of Technicolor Network Services, a Thomson brand. Based in Hilversum, The Netherlands, NOB CMF provides broadcasting, narrowcasting, and multimedia support services to the Dutch media and entertainment industries.
The IABM Awards will be presented on Saturday 8 September, the IBC Innovation Awards on Sunday 9 September, and the CSI Awards on Monday 10 September. IBC takes place at the RAI Centre, Amsterdam, September 6 to 11.
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For information about Grass Valley products from Thomson please visit www.thomsongrassvalley.com.
