Scandinavian company Telenor Satellite Broadcasting chose JPEG2000-based solutions from T-VIPS AS, a provider of video management and distribution products, for the contribution and primary distribution of the Euro 2008 soccer championship in SD and HD for TV 2 Norway, TV 2 Denmark and TV4 Sweden.
T-VIPS’ TVG415 and TVG430 video gateways compressed and encoded the HD and SD video streams in Vienna, Austria, prior to being transmitted over fiber to the TV 2 Norway playout center in Bergen, TV 2 Denmark playout in Odense and the TV4 playout in Stockholm. At these playout centers, the JPEG2000 video streams were decoded by TVG415/430s prior to being produced and adapted for end-user distribution. Telenor selected T-VIPS’ encoders for the European championships following the successful use of T-VIPS equipment for the transport of HD UK Premier League soccer from London to Sweden.
The TVG430 video gateway can send HD-SDI video over a 50Mb/s–270Mb/s connection with no errors, low delay and I-frame encoding. JPEG2000 is wavelet-based and encodes each frame independently. This means that errors introduced through packet loss are not carried over to subsequent frames — a huge advantage in terms of error resiliency.
Svein Bruten, senior system architect of DVB at Telenor Satellite Broadcasting, said JPEG2000 is now a mature technology that allows broadcasters to transport HD video efficiently and at a high quality. Lab tests have shown that the JPEG2000 compression scheme provides lower latency and better picture quality for the consumer, without the artifacts that may appear when cascading MPEG compressions in the contribution and distribution chain.
For more information, visit http://www.t-vips.com/.
