Envivio is providing a Convergence Generation video headend for TU_ Telekom’s live standard and high definition IPTV services in Slovenia. TU_ Telekom will expand its existing SD IPTV service to 108 channels, add six channels of HD content, and migrate from MPEG-2 to a more efficient Envivio MPEG-4 AVC (H.264) encoding solution.
The Convergence Generation solution chosen by TU_ Telekom features the 4Caster C4 multichannel video compression system and the 4Stream satellite TV to IP gateway. The C4 encoder is built around a software compression architecture that allows operators to reconfigure service offerings, add product features, and update encoding performance without having to change hardware. 4Stream is an IP-based service gateway that allows MPEG-2 content downlinked from satellite to be delivered to the C4 compression system over a local IP network. This all-IP, all-digital processing of content eliminates the need for traditional intermediate analogue or digital video and audio interfaces between MPEG-2 decoders and MPEG-4 encoders, resulting in reduced cost and improved picture quality.
“While Envivio was one of several vendors that showed us high quality video encoding products, the software based compression architecture of their C4 offered a unique level of flexibility. It was the only encoder we saw that included significant video compression enhancements on the product development roadmap, enhancements that would allow us to improve the encoding performance in the future without requiring expensive and disruptive hardware changes,” said Andras Pali, CTO of TU_ Telekom. “The all-IP architecture of the headend is also very appealing. Routing and switching the video signals in IP is very efficient, cost-effective and fits perfectly into our operational environment.”
“We are very proud to have been selected by TU_ Telekom against some strong competition to deliver their first MPEG-4 AVC based IPTV services,” said Julien Sign_s, president and CEO of Envivio. “Many customers, like TU_ Telekom, are beginning to realise that the vast majority of high-end encoders in the market today have almost identical compression performance. This is because they all use exactly the same underlying, hardware-based architecture. However, the software-based architecture used by Envivio offers the same performance as the competition today, yet provides the ability to improve that performance in the future through software, not hardware, upgrades.”
