FOX turned to TANDBERG Television for HD encoding and multiplexing solutions at the recent Super Bowl in Jacksonville, FL, and will rely on the company’s solutions for its coverage of the Daytona 500.
At the heart of the system are four SD/HD multiplexes featuring TANDBERG Television’s E5770 SD and E5780 HD MPEG-2 encoders, used to transmit the events to affiliates around the country in native 720p HD. The complete system, installed in September 2004, includes five SD/HD combination MPEG-2 encoding systems with statistical multiplexing.
The launch of the multiplex distribution system has been central to FOX’s successful transmission of sports programming in 720p HD since September. On Sundays throughout this NFL season, the bandwidth-efficient systems allowed FOX to transmit up to six games in HD over satellite to affiliates around the country. FOX’s HD viewers see the TANDBERG encoding, further strengthened by the network’s unique MPEG distribution architecture wherein FOX stations do not decode and re-compress the network signal but pass it seamlessly through to their audience.
FOX deploys the TANDBERG encoding and monitoring equipment in its remote vehicles and uplinks at the event sites. Once received at the FOX Network Center in Los Angeles, the programming is sent into the SD/HD multiplex and distributed to FOX affiliates. TANDBERG TT1280 HD decoders are used to monitor the network HD feed at the affiliate level to verify video and audio quality, captioning and other attributes. The end-to-end distribution chain is monitored over a TANDBERG Television nCompass system at network headquarters, providing operators with a complete view of the operational health of all system components.
For more information, visit www.tandbergtv.com.
