Sky Italia has installed an IP video contribution network between its broadcast centres in Rome and Milan, which are used to produce and distribute the broadcaster’s 40 sports channels, writes Kevin Hilton.
As well as the Sky-branded services, Eurosport, La7 and RAI are also carried, providing coverage of top-flight Italian, English, Spanish and German football, plus rugby, tennis and American sports.
To improve quality and efficiency of bandwidth, Sky Italia is using ATEME encoders and decoders for its multi-channel service.
The network was installed by systems integrator CVE, with 10Gbps and 2Gpbs circuits carrying low delay, uncompressed video signals on the optical part of the circuit and compressed JPEG2000 and MPEG4 feeds using IP.
“The efficiency of the ATEME MPEG4 4:2:2 ten-bit compression allows Sky Italia to increase the number of channels transmitted, while keeping the same backbone,” commented Massimo Bertolotti, head of platform engineering and innovation at Sky Italia (pictured). “Extra capacity will always be available on short notice by simply moving services to a higher compression efficiency.”
