Technology from video-over-IP transport provider Net Insight is supporting a wide range of contributions for North and South American and European broadcasters in South Africa for the coverage of the 2010 World Cup.
The Stockholm-headquartered company has been contracted by EPSN to manage the distribution of feeds from South Africa along undersea fiber-optic cables into the broadcaster’s New York hub. ESPN will then route that feed to its affiliates in South America.
The Net Insight Nimbra platform of network switchers will also be used extensively to transport live video coverage and data services to Canadian transmission services provider Aldea Vision. Aldea has integrated the platform as part of a network upgrade to provide World Cup contributions to its South American broadcast customers, including TVN Chile. Nimbra will also transport the host feed to Eurovision, the terrestrial network services wing of the European Broadcast Union (EBU), which acts on behalf of Europe’s public broadcasters.
GlobeCast has also ordered new Nimbra nodes to be installed for the contribution links from the World Cup. “The next big leap for large-scale events like the World Cup will be 1080p, but although we are enabling some 3Gb/s on a trial basis in 2010, the industry is not ready yet,” said Fredrik Trägårdh, CEO of Net Insight.
The satellite teleport and telecommunications infrastructure for the World Cup will support transmission capacity of 40Gb/s and will be used after 2010 to provide broadband services to the country. Johannesburg’s international broadcast center will be the nerve center during the tournament, receiving broadcast transmissions from the stadiums and distributing them from a neighboring satellite farm covering 5000m.
