COPENHAGEN—TDC provides pay-TV services for the Nordic region, including Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland. We provide 100 linear OTT channels to some 1.5 million subscribers in Denmark alone.
Like other service providers, we are well aware that the video quality of today’s smartphones and tablets has made such devices true “second screens” for broadcast audiences.
Mads Arnbjørn Rasmussen In recognition of this, we recently decided to upgrade our existing encoding and transcoding equipment to ensure that our clients have a consistently good viewing experience, no matter what they’re using to watch it on.
We launched a pilot program to help us determine the best equipment choice, realizing that while the most important factor was the ability to provide high-quality video, we were also concerned about power consumption, ease of integration and operation, as well as system redundancy and reliability. We were also concerned about the number of IP switches required to accommodate the number of channels we planned to offer.
After researching several options, we settled on Appear TV’s XC500 video processing platform as it met all of our requirements in a single integrated platform.
FLEXIBLE CONFIGURATION
The modular nature of Appear’s processing platform allowed us to select the modules needed for our requirements. As our business evolves and requirements change we can add additional units as needed. This modular approach gives us the flexibility of a software solution along with the reliability provided by hardware. The XC5000 modules are designed to integrate with third-party devices, so setup was straightforward. And as all modules are housed in a single platform, the system is easily managed through one open user interface. For our particular application, we selected TV’s Multiscreen and OTT modules, which allow us to distribute multiple signals from any input source and in any format. This module uses the latestgeneration encoding and transcoding techtechnology to support transcoding large numbers of services more efficiently, and at a higher quality level, over software-based platforms.
Appear TV’s integrated multilevel redundancy provides us with seamless integration between broadcast equipment and IP networks. The integrated IP-based QoS solution takes a holistic view of operation and network management, with the single software core capable of handling failures on both inputs and outputs, thus providing seamless video switching in Layer 3 networks. It also provides automatic backup in case of service stream failures due to packet loss or burst errors. There’s also a lot of internal redundancy in the system itself.
SAVES ELECTRICITY AND SPACE
In addition to meeting video quality and redundancy requirements, the Appear TV system also addressed power consumption. While it has the capacity to support processing 2,000 to 3,000 channel profiles, it consumes about one-tenth of the power required by comparable systems. The complete system occupies just 42RUs, just about one-tenth of the real estate required by other systems. As a result of this reduced power consumption and small footprint the total cost of ownership is significantly less than with other solutions.
Mads Arnbjørn Rasmussen is vice president of TV and coax technology at TDC. He may be contacted at mar@tdc.dk.
For additional information, visit Appear TV at www.appeartv.com.
