Crawford Satellite Services has launched an MPEG-4 HD platform on SES AMERICOM’s satellite AMC-18, offering bandwidth-efficient distribution and transport to meet the domestic distribution requirements of programmers to cable and DBS providers.

With its HD launch Dec. 31, 2007, cable TV network the Tennis Channel used Crawford’s MPEG-4 service to allow satellite partner DIRECTV to access the signal.

Crawford has selected Motorola’s MCPC (multiple channel per carrier) MPEG-4 HD platform with redundant encoding and multiplexing as its video compression system. With this technology, Crawford can employ DVB-S2 advanced modulation and MPEG-4 compression technology, which makes more efficient use of satellite bandwidth.

For more information, visit www.crawford.com.