Bharti Selects TANDBERG Television

TANDBERG Television, part of the Ericsson
Group, announced that Bharti Telemedia, a subsidiary of Bharti Airtel Ltd., has
chosen its market-leading advanced IP head-end for the launch of a new Direct to Home (DTH) satellite TV service in

India.
Bharti Telemedia’s state-of-the-art DTH system will use a range of TANDBERG
Television’s proven solutions including the iSIS 8000 IP head-end and MPEG-4
AVC standard definition encoders. The system is one of the first satellite DTH
platforms in the world to benefit from the compression efficiencies of standard
definition MPEG-4 AVC, significantly increasing transponder capacity and potentially doubling the
amount of available channels.

“We are excited to be deploying such advanced technology and infrastructure
to offer a best-in-class DTH service to our customers. To launch this service
we needed more than a technology supplier, we looked for a television partner. TANDBERG
Television was a clear choice as the company brings a strong combination of
market-leading IP and MPEG-4 AVC technology, coupled with more than a decade of
experience of enabling some of the world’s largest DTH satellite operations,”
says N Arjun, Executive Director, Bharti Telemedia.

The DTH services will be launched nationally across

India and Bharti is setting up a
state-of-the-art infrastructure near Gurgaon (Haryana) for the purpose of
uplinking and broadcast. By using the latest MPEG-4 AVC video compression, and
IP technologies, Bharti can cost-effectively deliver more channels in less
bandwidth, while still maintaining high quality pictures.

“We are proud to have been selected to provide the video head-end infrastructure
for such a prestigious project. The launch of Bharti’s DTH services will add
tremendously to the operator’s existing bouquet of integrated communications.
By using our state-of-the-art IP and advanced compression technologies Bharti
is able to deploy a world-class, future-proofed infrastructure that will enable
it to deliver a high quality customer experience that can scale, cost- efficiently
as the service grows,” says Roger Bolton, Executive VP of Compression
Solutions at TANDBERG Television.

Advanced IP infrastructure

At the heart of the Bharti head-end is the TANDBERG

iSIS
8000 which includes best-in-class video encoding, IP multiplexing and new receiver/decoders.
The system is brought together under a single control and management system, nCompass.
The TANDBERG MX8400 IP Multiplexer, is a next generation DVB-S2 ready solution
which will provide Bharti with an open standards, IP based head-end with
support for up to 4 independent multiplexed outputs from a single unit. The combination
of Reflex statistical multiplexing and this advanced multiplexing architecture
ensures maximum usage of available bit-rate.

Further bandwidth efficiencies are achieved by the use of the TANDBERG EN8030
MPEG-4

AVC

SD encoders, based on the company’s
next-generation compression platform. The TANDBERG EN8030 use a comprehensive
tool-set of advanced compression video processing features, combined with new pre-processing
techniques. Itdelivers the industry’s leading picture quality versus
performance through bandwidth improvements of up to 50% over traditional MPEG-2
based DTH services.