TANDBERG lowers bit rate for IPTV content delivery

At NAB2007, TANDBERG Television is launching its iPlex UltraCompression HD and SD IPTV headend system. Based on the company's second-generation AVC platform — Intelligent Compression Engine (ICE3) — the iPlex video-processing system combines density and enhanced features with improved picture quality performance. And, the new system delivers bandwidth improvements of up to 50 percent over previously deployed MPEG-4 AVC units, according to the company.

The iPlex is a flexible video-processing platform designed as a complete IPTV headend solution. It includes MPEG-2 SD encoding, MPEG-4 AVC HD and SD encoding, MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 AVC transcoding, MPEG-2 transrating, and picture-in-picture (PIP) service generation.

With a telco-designed chassis, the iPlex delivers new bandwidth efficiencies due to improved motion estimation processes, single slice video-processing architecture, dedicated processing for low-resolution encoding of PIP services, as well as multipass analysis and enhanced video pre-processing (based on 12 new patent applications).

With MPEG-4 AVC HD UltraCompression, iPlex enables the delivery of two full-resolution HDTV channels over ADSL2+ at 2km, with data rates below 6Mb/s at 1080i and 4Mb/s at 720p resolution.

Also, due to the iPlex's high-performance video processing and multichannel density, service providers can roll out a competitive channel lineup over existing ADSL2+ infrastructures with more than 100 channels and simultaneous delivery of four or more SD or two HD channels per home. The iPlex video processing platform is managed by TANDBERG nCompass Control and Monitoring, which also controls the professional receivers and descramblers used for content acquisition.

Visit TANDBERG at NAB booth # SU4211, or for more information, visit www.tandbergtv.com/.