Nilesat’s new regional digital platform, The Nilesat Smart Digital Broadcasting System, will provide for the compression and multiplexing of 360 TV services and 120 radio services over 24 digital transport streams, with the ability to expand up to 480 TV Services and 30 transport streams, the company claims. The technology will be delivered by partners Cisco, Bridge Technologies and Newtec, with a launch scheduled for next month.
Nilesat currently broadcasts over 730 TV channels, and over 140 digital radio channels uplinked from Cairo, Dubai, Amman, Doha, Riyadh and Beirut. Over 75 per cent of the TV channels are free to air, and the Nilesat audience in the MENA region has shown steady growth, from 11 million households in 2003 to more than 60 million households in 2013. According to the most recent surveys in 2013, Nilesat has the largest audience share, with about 95 per cent of the households in the MENA region.
Media Era Technologies (Mera-Tech) has been appointed as the integrator and consultancy partner to assist Nilesat. Cisco is continuing its long-standing relationship with Nilesat by introducing new technologies with the aim of enhancing the company’s customer offering in the Middle East and beyond. Cisco Media Production Solutions enable Nilesat to extend content to any business unit, partner, or customer device, anywhere in the world, as well as to reduce costs by consolidating and virtualising media applications and infrastructures. Cisco’s solution based on D9036 encoder and DCM platform, provides all the features Nilesat needs in the digital headend, including acquisition, encoding and transcoding, and video processing.
Bridge Technologies has been chosen to provide the digital media measuring and analysis technology for the Nilesat Smart Digital Video Broadcasting System. The company’s VB330 core probes, VB288 Content Extractor, VB272 Satellite RF S/S2 analysis, VB242 for ASI analysis, VB220 for IP analysis and VBC for probes full management will be deployed at the main production facility and headends to provide a monitoring capability for up to 900 services and 48 transport streams over Nilesat’s network during the first phase of the project, increasing to up to 1100 services and 60 transport streams in the second phase.
Newtec delivered more than thirty M6100 Broadcast Satellite Modulators, including full automatic redundancy, tailored to Nilesat’s specifications. The provided solution can be upgraded to support DVB-S2X and Carrier ID insertion (DVB-CID), on top of other Newtec advanced satellite technologies that are compatible with the DVB-S2 standard.
