A new HD channel from Eurosport, based on Thomson Grass Valley K2 media servers, will be on the air for the French Open tennis tournament beginning May 25.
The new channel airs from its main all-digital broadcast center in Issy-les-Moulineaux (near Paris. A large Thomson Grass Valley K2 storage area network (SAN) based around multiple K2 media server systems will support the operation. The overall project is the one of the largest HD SAN ever installed by Thomson and is valued at more than $3 million.
Eurosport, Europe’s leading sports multimedia platform, is owned by the TF1 group and broadcasts in 20 languages to 112 million homes across 59 countries in Europe as well as 10 countries in Asia. Thomson was contracted to provide a full range of services to the new Eurosport HD project, including system design, installation and 24/7 customer service.
The new K2 HD SAN will be used to handle incoming satellite and fiber feeds and to play out sports content to air. It will accomplish this using 44 Thomson Grass Valley video server channels, in both SD and HD, complete with 1000 hours of online storage (at 100Mb/s HD resolution), six stand-alone K2 servers and an archive system.
For more information, visit http://www.thomsongrassvalley.com/.
