Finnish radio and TV distributor Digita Oy is using Envivio's Mobile Series video encoding platform to launch new mobile TV services. Owned by French company TDF, Digita Oy will make 10 channels of DVB-H free-to-air and pay-TV content available to Finland's mobile operators. All broadcast channels are encoded in real time using the Envivio 4Caster M2 platform protected by an Envivio 4Manager N+M automated redundancy system.
"Encoding may be just one of several components required to deliver a mobile television service," said Marianne Hynninen, Digita Oy VP for mobile TV, "but it plays a critically important role in ensuring that the service will attract and retain subscribers. The timetable for building our headend and launching the service was very short, less than sixty days."
For operators faced with an exploding number of services and devices, Envivio's Convergence Series architecture and multiprofile encoding technology lets operators simultaneously deliver video streams at multiple bit rates and resolutions from a single input, for multiple mobile devices as well as broadcast and Internet TV.
"The average operator has to deliver video to about 30 different handsets," says Ian Locke, Envivio VP of global communications. "Quality has to be good in a 2G network at 80kb/s and in a 3G network at 150kb/s to 250kb/s. There's not one stream that can go to all these devices. You need to create content simultaneously in multiple streams. Multiprofile encoding is essential to having the best possible quality.
"The more [mobile TV] is like cable and satellite — despite what we've been told about the long tail — the more people will want to watch it," he says. "What people will pay for is to turn it on and watch."
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