Spanish HDTV service Starmax HD is using content management and transmission services from France Telecom subsidiary GlobeCast for aggregation, encryption and delivery of its full channel lineup. The end-to-end GlobeCast service for Starmax HD includes fiber contribution from several countries, reception of SD and HD channels at the company's Sainte Assise Teleport in France, and signal compression in MPEG-4 with multiplexing, uplink, satellite capacity and encryption.
Starmax HD was developed to stimulate HDTV viewing in Spain with an affordable prepaid package without requiring a subscription or minimum sign-up period. In addition to GlobeCast's content management and transmission services, the Starmax platform uses set-top boxes from Ferguson and viewer access cards from Conax. Starmax viewers can record programs and play content files from external hard drives as well as access streaming content from the Internet through the set-top box.
