RRsat Global Communications Network, an Israeli content management and global distribution services supplier, will provide its playout and uplink services for HIGHTV 3D’s program lineup. The new 3-D channel, set to launch April 4, will be available to millions of viewers with access to more than 450 hours of high-quality 3-D programming, played out and distributed by RRsat over the Eurobird-9A satellite to Europe and over the MEASAT-3a satellite across Asia-Pacific.
HIGHTV 3D will feature a full slate of HD 3-D programming, ranging from dramas and comedies to lifestyle and fashion. The channel will be played out from RRsat’s playout center using MPEG-4 compression and the DVB-S2 broadcast standard. The playout center will also provide archival storage of more than 4TB.
Koby Zontag, senior director of sales and business development at RRsat, said that the company has already established the capability to transmit live 3-D interactive broadcasts over fiber between continents and helped support a major European 10-day sporting event broadcast in 3-D over satellite.
“Working alongside HIGHTV, we intend to demonstrate that 3-D TV is a valuable format in the genres of entertainment and lifestyles‚” he said.
“HIGHTV aims to take 3-D TV beyond the limited and local audiences it is currently geared toward,” said Gwenael Flatres, head of business development at HIGHTV. “By utilizing RRsat’s state-of-the-art technological capabilities and wide reach of the RRsat Global Network, we are capable of taking 3-D programming to a global market, entering a new chapter in TV history with 24 hours of nonrepeating 3-D programming, seven days a week.”
Headquartered in Los Angeles, with offices in Hong Kong, Paris, London and Singapore, HIGHTV 3D will be the first international 24/7 3-D family channel that features a unique mix of entertainment, lifestyle and original reality shows in HD 3-D. HIGHTV 3D said it would provide a native 3-D VOD library with more than 450 hours of 3-D programs, travel destinations, cooking shows, animation, drama series, reality shows and entertainment news.
RRsat’s playout center uses equipment including servers from Omneon, Harris and PlayBox, Snell routers, Cavena subtitling, Pebble Beach automation systems and Harmonic Scopus MPEG-2 DVB encoding and multiplexing systems.
