Telefonica, the Spanish national telecom provider, is installing Grass Valley ViBE EM2000 MPEG-2 SD encoders at its IPTV headend facility to make the most of its available bandwidth.
The ViBE EM2000, based on the company’s Mustang compression engine, delivers MPEG-4 compression of SD television signals in smaller bandwidths with superior picture quality.
The encoder reduces significantly the bandwidth requirement for comparable video quality over existing solutions. This is particularly valuable for IPTV services by making individual streams more robust on longer last-mile circuits to individual subscribers, thus increasing the reach of the service to a greater number of households. The lower bandwidth requirement also reduces the impact on the network infrastructure, allowing for more services to be added and releasing capacity for other data services.
Grass Valley provided the complete headend for Telefonica’s IPTV service in a turnkey contract in 2006. With the new order, Telefonica has now returned to Grass Valley to update the headend with ViBE EM2000 SD encoders.
