BRACKNELL, England—As broadcasters grapple with a spectrum crunch stemming from the FCC’s C-band spectrum-reallocation efforts, Techex will show NAB Show New York attendees how its tx darwin platform can be used to combine satellite and IP delivery.
Techex, set to exhibit in Booth 623 during the Oct. 21–22 show at Manhattan’s Javits Convention Center, says its solution helps broadcasters maintain reliable affiliate feeds while adapting programming and advertising to individual markets.
With the Federal Communications Commission’s spectrum reallocation efforts set to reduce available satellite bandwidth in the C-band, broadcasters are looking for other options. The Ku-band offers additional capacity, Techex said, but it is susceptible to rain fade. This creates a practical concern for stations, according to Techex: how to switch satellite bands without risking feed interruptions. The company said tx darwin solves for this by combining Ku-band delivery with IP to keep feeds available when the satellite path degrades.
The platform also supports SRT and RIST protocols for IP transport, Techex said, with SMPTE ST 2022-7 protection across separate IP paths strengthening delivery resilience.
“Ku band can provide the capacity, but nobody wants to explain a rain-fade outage to an audience during a live event,” Tim Jackson, senior director of sales and business development at Techex, said. “Using technology and vendor-agnostic IP solutions to seamlessly cover the affected services lets broadcasters move affiliates to Ku-band now with confidence.”
The tx darwin platform also supports local blackouts and seamless content replacement directly in the compressed domain, Techex said, avoiding quality loss from re-encoding and additional encoding latency. Time delay and content replacement allow broadcasters to create market-specific programming across time zones, the company said, while SCTE-35 manipulation allows affiliate stations to insert local advertising. Forensic watermarking supports content security and traceability at scale and comprehensive delivery analytics provide visibility into the streams, Techex said.
Hybrid satellite and IP distribution, master control and affiliate delivery run on the same modular tx darwin platform, according to Techex. Broadcasters can deploy it on premises, in the cloud or across hybrid environments, the company said.
