Tandberg Television, part of the Ericsson group, was a proud supplier of HD encoding equipment to Siemens IT Solutions and Services for the transmission of the Live Earth concert earlier in July. Taking place in nine different cities across the seven continents, Tandberg Television enabled coverage to be broadcast to a global audience of two billion people in 120 countries, writes Andy Stout.
Tandberg Television supplied its E5788 HD DSNG encoder and TT1280 HD and RX1290 SD/HD professional receivers to ensure Siemens was equipped with a reliable headend system. The E5788 is a space efficient, flexible, premium quality MPEG-2 HD DSNG encoder, which is ideal for use in the transmission of live world-class events. Designed to complement the E5788, the TT1280 HD professional receiver completes an ideal end-to-end HD system. The award-winning RX1290 is Tandberg Television’s latest professional receiver and the world’s first professional multiformat MPEG-2/MPEG-4 AVC decoder, capable of processing and decoding more video formats than any other receiver on the market.
“Live Earth was the beginning of a major campaign to raise awareness of the crisis our climate is facing and it was vital that television coverage was broadcast seamlessly,” said Peter Harrison, system specialist satellite operations, Siemens IT Solutions and Services. “We were very impressed both by the error-free performance and the quality of the user interface of the solutions that Tandberg Television provided. With such a huge global audience, any audio or video faults during the show would have caused major problems and the quality of the transmission is a testament to the superior performance and reliability of Tandberg Television’s technology.”
Nine cities staged concerts across the world, including London, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, New Jersey and Tokyo. Some of the biggest names in the music industry performed at Wembley Stadium, including Madonna, who wrote a new song for the event, Foo Fighters, Duran Duran, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica and Spinal Tap, who ‘reformed’ especially for Live Earth.
“We were proud to be involved with the Live Earth event and to support the message that was being sent out across the world. We have undertaken a number of environmental initiatives here at Tandberg Television and it was great to provide assistance to an event of such huge global scale,” said David Mitchinson, newsgathering business development manager at Tandberg Television. “Our upgradeable equipment is designed to grow with the customer and not be obsolete as soon as more advanced solutions become available. We are committed to supplying full-upgradeable solutions, rather than having to manufacture and transport new equipment to our customers when they need it. Furthermore, with our second generation encoding platform, we have reduced power consumption by approximately 65%, without compromising on performance and reliability.”
