RENNES, FRANCE—The Republic of Ivory Coast is in the process of making the transition to digital terrestrial television and has gone with French transmitter manufacturer Thomson Video Network to help drive the transition. The company’s ViBE EM4000 encoders and NetProcessor 9030/40 multiplexers/video processors with DVB-T2 gateway are serving as the foundation for the pilot DTT video headend for CNM-TNT, the national Ivory Coast committee in charge of the transition.

NetProcessor 9040

The headend pilot is a collaboration between Thomson Broadcast and French DTT technology providers Sagemcom and HTTV. In addition to the ViBE and NetProcessor from TVN, the headend comes with an Amethyst redundancy switch. The systems will allow the government to test and evaluate the DTT service before rolling it out across the country. For the tests, the headend was first installed in Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s largest city.

Under the terms of agreement with the ITU, Ivory Coast must make the switch from analog to digital and put a DVB-T2 on air for VHF frequencies by June 2020.