France’s Canal Overseas relies on Omneon servers for HD transmission

Canal Overseas, which provides 24/7 satellite distribution of France’s Canal+ programming to subscribers in Africa, the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and the South Pacific, has based its new HD playout system on Omneon’s Spectrum HD media servers.

At Canal Overseas, the two 10TB Spectrum servers offer eight channels of ingest along with 20 channels of dual output (HD and downconverted SD) for preview and playout. They are part of a facility makeover from SD to HD that also relies on DBOS automation from SGT and on Front Porch Digital’s DIVArchive middleware integrated with a Sun Microsystems StorageTek library for content storage management. The system was installed in late 2007 and went on the air in January.

Canal+ is the largest French pay-television group. Besides broadcasting Canal+ programming from its facility in St. Cloud, near Paris, Canal Overseas produces some of its own programming for the international market.

For more information, visit www.omneon.com.