Grass Valley transmission and signal processing divisions rebranded

In the wake of the impending sale of its Grass Valley division to Francisco Partners, Technicolor has rebranded its established business units for its transmission and signal processing technology, which will now be called Thomson Broadcast and Thomson Video Networks, respectively. Both groups are exhibiting their latest products at the IBC 2010 show in Amsterdam this week in the Grass Valley stand (1.D11).

Now under the leadership of Nicolas Dallery, the move retains the Thomson name for its solid-state and tube-based transmitters, which customers have come to associate with the brand. This includes the DCX Millennium digital UHF transmitter that is used for the modulation and broadcast of both DVB-T and ATSC-compliant digital terrestrial signals. The Thomson Broadcast division offers both high- and low-power models for terrestrial television, radio and scientific transmission applications. Among the product portfolio is a range of DTV antennas, transmitters and Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) radio systems.

Thomson Video Networks will develop and market a series of video compression and content processing solutions that are typically located at the digital headend facilities of large multichannel service providers (such as DIRECTV) to help them manage bandwidth more efficiently. The group will continue to develop hybrid and multiformat compression systems (encoders, decoders and multiplexers) for DTH, terrestrial and mobile TV, IPTV, as well as Web TV networks based around the core ViBE product family. The company also provides strategies for migration to IP-based video transport, video server technologies, and redundancy and monitoring systems. Christophe Delahousse will continue to head Thomson Video Networks, as he has for several years.