Swiss telecom provider Swisscom has 5.7 million mobile customers and roughly 1.8 million broadband connections. Swisscom TV air (www.swisscom.ch/tvair) is the latest in the provider’s line of innovative services. The service enables customers to watch TV on all three screens: television, computer and mobile phone. Customers can receive 34 live HD channels at home on their computer or on their mobile while they are out and about.
To be the first provider in Switzerland to enable customers to watch TV on all three screens, Swisscom needed a solution that could deliver multiformat, multichannel, multi-delivery capabilities, while providing high-quality video. It was important to minimize capital expenditures and implement a solution that would integrate with its existing IP headend infrastructure and efficiently scale as the number of subscribers and concurrent sessions increased.
The provider also needed to create a comprehensive and flexible service infrastructure that could bring its different services — broadcast, web and mobile — together under one simplified umbrella handled by a unified delivery system. In order to do this, Swisscom chose a Harmonic ProStream 4000 transcoder. The transcoder seamlessly handles both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) broadcast video content to mobile and Internet formats. The transcoder achieved tight integration into the complex, multi-protocol delivery system.
