TANDBERG Television Debuts iPlex UltraCompression Transcoding at Telco TV

At Telco
TV 2007 (booth #711,
Georgia
World
Congress

Center, October 23-25) TANDBERG
Television, part of the Ericsson Group, will show its award-winning iPlex
UltraCompression IPTV video processing platform and debut its high performance
integrated transcoding capabilities for the first time in
North
America. The new iPlex UltraCompression transcoder furthers
TANDBERG Television’s market leadership in the IPTV space. It supports
multi-format MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC SD and HD input streams and uses TANDBERG Television’s
best-in-class next generation AVC platform to transcode them to either MPEG-4
AVC SD or HD output.

Up to 4
UltraCompression transcoders are supported in the 1RU iPlex video processing
platform, giving the iPlex market leading density. By supporting transcoding,
the iPlex video processing platform ensures the integrity of metadata in the
transport streams (closed captioning, teletext etc.) and maximizes the
performance of lip sync issues with subtitles. Additionally, when used in
conjunction with bulk descrambling receivers, the iPlex transcoding
architecture reduces the cost of the overall head-end design and improves video
quality.

‘Building
on the success of the iPlex UltraCompression platform, our transcoding
capability sets a new industry performance benchmark. It offers an elegant and
cost-effective way for service providers to take advantage of the bit-rate
savings associated with MPEG-4 AVC while using either MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 AVC
compressed programming from content providers,’ said Ian Tapp, senior vice
president, business development, TANDBERG Television, Inc. ‘The integrated
approach in the iPlex not only simplifies system architectures, but also
enables the increase in IPTV picture quality that we know our North American
customers want.’

The
TANDBERG Television integrated transcoding solution offers a variety of
advantages over disparate, multiple unit solutions. It converts an incoming HD
or SD MPEG-2 transport stream to digital baseband, avoiding the composite video
interconnection common in multi-box approaches, performs pre-processing for
picture and compression optimization, and then encodes the stream into MPEG-4
AVC on a single submodule. The integrated design allows for increased signal
processing control, in turn significantly increasing the compression
performance. Also, ancillary data such as Teletext and Closed Captions is left
intact, allowing the solution to conform with country-specific requirements.

With more
and more HDTV operations using MPEG-4 AVC systems, the UltraCompression
transcoder also provides the simplest solution for MPEG-4 to MPEG-4 rate
conversion by enabling the operator to take this new content off-air and adapt
it to the needs of their IPTV network.

Picture-in-Picture
(PiP) images are also generated alongside the main video stream. Increased
density lowers a service provider’s upfront equipment costs, eliminates
cabling, reduces power costs, improves overall system reliability and minimizes
rack space.