Tandberg Television will supply its video compression systems for China's first national HD rollout, as that nation prepares for the all-HD 2008 summer Olympics. The company's new HD service for government-controlled China Central Television (CCTV), according to Tandberg, is being deployed to provide a state-of-the-art infrastructure to ensure that most of China's estimated 1.3 billion citizens eventually will have access to HD content of some kind.
CCTV partner NDT has tapped Tandberg Television to provide an MPEG-2 head-end system, which has been in trials for the past several months. The HD video delivery system is based on the bandwidth-reducing capabilities of Tandberg Television's E5780 MPEG-2 HD encoder. Based in Oslo, Norway, Tandberg Television has been working with Chinese broadcasters since the late 1990s.
CCTV's HD service has begun offering movies, TV series, documentaries and 3D-like animation shows. But the pending Olympics clearly have put the nation's HD buildout on a faster track. Beijing itself is already dubbing it the "High Definition Games." Looking well beyond the Olympics, the Chinese government has set a deadline of 2015 for the culmination of the country's total migration to DTV, and subsequent nationwide analog turnoff.
