TV2GO uses FOR-A’s frame rate converter for Super Bowl XLII

TV2GO Inc., an international satellite transmission and video production company, recently uplinked Super Bowl XLII  to broadcasters in Europe and Asia in HD using FOR-A’s frame rate converter, the FRC-7000.

Fourteen stations took in the world feed as their primary source for broadcasting Super Bowl XLII, including England’s BSkyB, SkyItalia, Russias’s NTV+, Diasat in Denmark, Belgium’s Telinet, Fox Sports Turkey, Yes TV in Israel, Canal Plus in Poland, ARD in Germany, Canal+ in Spain, PCCW and AGV in Hong Kong, SMG in Shanghai and CCTV in China. The World Feed, a broadcast created by NFL Films International, contained all the graphics, music and explicit English commentary geared toward audiences that may not be familiar with rules of American football or the key players on the competing teams.

BBC in London and FujiTV in Japan accepted TV2GO’s signal as a back up to their own show, which was transmitting from the Arizona stadium via fiber optics.

This latest transmission of Super Bowl XLII marks a dramatic increase in the number of stations accepting the feed from last year’s Super Bowl. TV2GO partner Lawrence Partington explains, “Foreign appetite for North American sports events is growing by leaps and bounds. The broadcasts look slick and we can send it with such a beautiful signal. We transmitted the Super Bowl last year with FOR-A’s FRC-7000 to three European broadcasters. I attribute the jump this year to fourteen in part to the FRC-7000’s proven ability to send such high quality HD live sports programming with ease.”

The FRC-7000 uses motion compensation processing by motion vectors to convert field frequencies and enables conversion between different HD frame rates. The FRC-7000 is ideal for converting the frame rate prior to transmitting at international sporting events, for example.

The FRC-7000 has Scene Cut Detection that detects scene cuts automatically to ensure that the conversion is performed without generating a motion compensation image from unrelated cuts in the frames before and after. The unit also provides for genlock. Process control can be performed for the post-conversion video. The video level, chroma level, chroma phase, setup level, and clips can be adjusted to produce the optimal video quality.

Adding the FRC-70DE-D or FRC-70DE-E to the FRC-70DA option enables Dolby E data decoding and encoding using only the FRC-7000. The FRC-70DA also includes a BB output terminal in synchronization with input and output SDI. Synchronous signals can be supplied to external Dolby E equipment. Even when users already have Dolby E decoder/encoder equipment, this allows significant simplification when building Dolby E systems, which tend to grow in complexity when performing rate conversion.

The FRC-7000 also supports eight-channel; 48 kHz 24-bit embedded audio signals in sync with the video clock. It also includes a delay function for synchronization with video processing.