Belgium’s VRT Recruits NovelSat for Live Broadcasting of the Tour de France

VRT (Vlaamse Radio -en Televisieomroeporganisatie), the Belgium national public service broadcaster for the Flemish Region and Community, has once again selected Novelsat’s highly efficient broadcast solution to deliver live coverage of the Tour de France.

The on-the-road coverage of the Tour de France was delivered to VRT Broadcast Center from Satellite News Gathering (SNG) vans of Videohouse, a leading European provider of broadcast facilities. The SNG vans provided live broadcast coverage along the 3,500 km tour route which included challenging terrain and conditions.

Installed on both VRT Broadcast Center and Videohouse SNG vans, NovelSat’s solution delivered significant savings of satellite capacity utilizing NovelSat NS4™, the most bandwidth-efficient waveform, NovelSat DUET™ CEC™ (carrier-echo-cancellation) band reuse technology, and dual channel (ASI+IP) functionality for simultaneous bi-directional transmission of video and IP data.

NovelSat’s solutions deliver best-in-industry spectral efficiency and transmission performance, enabling broadcasters to transmit more bits and channels, and to gain significant savings in satellite bandwidth. All the software-based efficiency-enhancing features of Novelsat solution work together seamlessly out of the box, simplifying setup and operation.

“Novelsat technology is providing major benefits for large scale events such as the Tour de France,” said Tom Grenson, System Engineer of ICT Networking & Telecom at VRT. “VRT enjoyed the high-efficiency and high-performance transmission delivered by NovelSat solution.”

“High profile events such as the Tour de France requires flawless operation,” said Herman Vandenwaeyenberg, Broadcast Engineer at Videohouse. “We found the NovelSat solution easy to set up and operate, delivering high bandwidth transmission over narrow channels.”

“Novelsat is proud to enable the live broadcast of the Tour de France,” said Gary Drutin, CEO of NovelSat. “The partnership with VRT and Videohouse has demonstrated once again the benefits provided by our content connectivity solutions. We look forward to supporting additional demanding events.”