Christophe Delahousse
Q. What kind of products or services does your company offer for broadcasters?
Thomson Video Networks is a trusted partner of leading broadcasters around the world — we pride ourselves on an exceptional commitment to quality at every stage: from R&D, through professional services for our customers, to the picture on the viewer's screen. Everything we do ― from our end-to-end systems, to digital terrestrial to hybrid networks, solutions for digital video processing with advanced video splicing and transrating, and 3D video technologies — reflects that wholehearted commitment.
Above all, it is our technology and expertise in video compression that is at the heart of our business. We have a non-stop, no-compromise drive to develop the tools for delivering tomorrow's digital television.
Q. What's new that you will you show at the NAB Show and that TV broadcasters should look for there?
Our ViBE VS7000 video system is the newest product launch for us at NAB: it's a fully-integrated IP video solution for convergent applications like Web TV and Over-The-Top services delivery, traditional IPTV and IP/Cable delivery.
For ATSC broadcasting we have the ViBE EM3000, which delivers exceptional video quality, combining two full HD programs in a single transport stream or freeing bandwidth for mobile programming. And the NetProcessor 9030/40 provides the best multiplexing performance with software upgradeability to ATSC-MDTV.
Finally, our Sapphire MPEG Server, a "channel-in-a-box" solution with some outstanding capabilities in advanced capture, playout and regionalization, Operating frame-accurately in the compressed domain, Sapphire provides all the functions needed to ingest, process, brand and generate TV channels ready for air.
Q. How is your new product offering different from what's available on the market?
Fifteen years of best-in-class video quality and innovation in compression are built into the breakthrough ViBE VS7000 video system, which combines all major audio/video codecs, the latest adaptive streaming formats, and a resilient IT platform for native redundancy and scalability. There is no other comparable product on the market so it offers a completely fresh approach for convergent applications.
As the HD roll-out continues in both the broadcast and contribution markets and the digital switch over and live Web TV deployments proceed, the market requirement for very high-quality compression and bandwidth efficiency is spreading into a wider range of applications. Our current product portfolio in addition to new product introductions at NAB will allow us to benefit from these trends. We are continuing to invest in premium picture quality because there is still potential for further gains.
Q. How has your company been affected by the current economic situation and what are you doing to get through it?
2010 was a year of recovery in most of our geographical regions and segments (DTH, DTTV, IPTV/Web TV, and Cable).
We have had very good results recently in Latin America, and we have also performed well in the DTTV market as well as with T2 launches. Our existing DTH satellite operators continue to invest in the HD MPEG-4 rollout and some have already upgraded to our brand new SD MPEG-2 encoding solution that provides two more HD channels ― within the same bandwidth — than our previous generation of technology.
The corporate name change launch in September 2010 was a highly significant event in the long life of the Thomson brand, helping to refocus our activities in the current market. Thomson Video Networks is now a standalone business and our new structure enables to project a clearer industry presence, and to concentrate on developing our own portfolio of innovative technologies.
Q. Where are you based, and how many employees do you have? Anything else we should know about your company?
Thomson Video Networks employs over 400 highly-skilled people in the Americas, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa among which 150 are in the engineering team and 50 fully dedicated to local field services. The company's global headquarters is in France with additional sales and services locations in the US, Brazil, UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Russia, India, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Australia.
A key strength is our strong international service organization delivering highly professional, tailored systems and 24/7 support, all of which is backed up with a network of valuable business partners to complete our reach into nearly every corner of the globe.
We are looking forward to seeing all of our customers and partners at NAB 2011 on our stand SU4917 in Las Vegas.
