TAMUNING, GUAM
GTA TeleGuam is an innovative, full-service communications company dedicated to enhancing the lifestyles, productivity and the future of Guam's residents, business and government agencies. Our television service is a true 100 percent digital experience with the highest quality and one that provides our viewers with the freedom to control their programming.
BIG TIME ZONE DELAY REQUIREMENT
The Sencore TSS 3530A transport stream server In a business such as ours, a paramount consideration is the supply of quality and variety of viewing choices that the end customer wants and needs, while still meeting the requirements of the industry and our content providers. Our company makes available 200 channels of television programming to our subscribers in a mix of both standard and high definition. A lot of these offerings are network delivered feeds—about 140 of them, and are delayed for delivery into our local (Guam) time zone. The primetime programming that we receive from the continental United States is received via IP connectivity and then time zone shifted six or seven hours in order for these shows to appear during the prime hours here in Guam. We don't do any sort of long term storage with this network content. It is our business to cache it only long enough to be spooled out with the correct delay. Once it's retransmitted here, then the storage media is erased and overwritten with the next round of content.
Our programming providers are sending us a variety of MPEG-4 and MPEG-2 standard- and high-definition content with bit rates running anywhere from 2 to 10 Mbps or even higher, depending upon their source. It goes without saying that our server requirements are somewhat above and beyond those of a lot of operations. When we were setting up our operation, we knew we would need servers robust enough to handle the bandwidth of 200 channels and a system that was intelligent enough to multiplex, delay and output a consistent high-quality signal—dealing along the way with the consistently shifting combinations of encoding types and varying bit rates.
BEST EQUIPMENT FOR THE JOB
From our inception, we have placed a focused effort on being an innovator and selecting the best possible equipment for our not-so-easy tasks. Sencore has been our choice of server since we began the business of digital television program deployment. Their engineers have worked with those on our staff ours in implementing Sencore's TSS 3530A transport stream server, which is ideal technology for meeting both the needs of our customers and also the very stringent requirements we have for our business. The Sencore TSS 3530A is able to support 344 Mbps and up to 32 SPTS multicasts. This transport stream server met or exceeded all of these requirements and also includes the ability to control and monitor the unit remotely. The TSS 3530A can also provide seamless insertion of local programming.
From the beginning, it was key for the servers we use to have the ability to time zone shift, real-time muxing and to be able to be remotely controlled remotely. With the technology that Sencore provided, our engineers and techs are able to remotely monitor and modify our servers anywhere from within our network. Any perceived issues or changes to our programming can be handled quickly while making sure that signal is always there.
We have been very happy with our decision in choosing Sencore for this important task.
George Smith began his employment with GTA in 2005 as manager of the company's transmission division of GTA TeleGuam's Engineering Department. He was promoted to vice president of engineering in 2008. He and his team are responsible for the design and the implementation of GTA's IPTV headend and video systems as well as the island-wide broadband network supporting digital TV. He may be contacted at GSmith@gta.net
For additional information, contact Sencore at 800-736-2673 or visit www.sencore.com.
