ESPN taps Hibernia Media for delivery of World Cup feeds to North America

During the recent 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, Hibernia Media, a managed video transmission company, facilitated and monitored the delivery of live feeds from ESPN’s on-site broadcast facilities in SD, HD and 3-D formats, using Hibernia Media’s terrestrial network. The company also supported the routing of multilingual video feeds to North American rights holders. This year’s World Cup represented a migration from satellite to fiber-optic cable as the primary delivery method for all video transmissions.

While it monitored all feeds in the United States from its TV operations center in Baltimore, MD, facility, Hibernia Media also sent engineers to Johannesburg to work with ESPN within the International Broadcast Center (IBC) throughout the event. Once the feeds reached New York, they were connected to Hibernia Media’s fiber backbone for delivery to multiple North American broadcast partners who had rights to the 30-day tournament. Rights-holders included the Canadian Broadcasting Company, in Toronto and Montreal; Univision, in Miami (which was the Spanish language rights holder for the United States); DIRECTV (for consumer satellite delivery); Comcast and AT&T (to deliver 3-D coverage for cable subscribers); and three mobile television broadcasters (Real Networks, FloTV and MobiTV).

According to Hibernia Media, all broadcast feeds were successfully transmitted and received with no downtime or latency issues.

Hibernia Media also provided ESPN’s rights-holders with Dynamic Synchronous Transfer Mode (DTM) media transport services, which included two-way video transmission (sent natively using MPEG-4 compression), to deliver raw event feeds to North America, and to return the actual packaged broadcast from the North American rights-holders back to South Africa for monitoring and confirmation. Hibernia Media also arranged for Internet access and two-way data transfer over the same STM-4 (622M) circuit so that the rights-holders could use spare bandwidth for corporate data traffic. In addition, the company provided local, in-country technical support to the rights-holders for transmission management.

With over 150 media connection points in more than 70 markets across North America and Europe, Hibernia Media is one of the largest North American providers of managed video transport over fiber using DTM video streaming.