Televisa Selects Synamedia For Broadcast Distribution Overhaul

Synamedia
(Image credit: Synamedia)

ATLANTA and LONDON—Mexican telecommunications and broadcast company Televisa has selected Synamedia for an overhaul of its broadcast distribution.

The broadcast will deploy Synamedia’s Media Edge Gateway (MEG) and PowerVu across its network of 180 stations around Mexico to increase the agility of video distribution, processing and delivery, the company said.

By selecting Synamedia’s MEG, Televisa cut its hardware dependency in half, not only delivering cost benefits but also the modern technologies needed to future-proof its operations, it said. 

During the evaluation phase, Televisa used dozens of MEGs as a part of its strategy to broadcast the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022.  Synamedia managed backup channels and frame rate conversion. The success of the project contributed to Televisa’s ultimate decision to select Synamedia as its new software partner, it said.

“Not only did Synamedia build us a truly unique solution – one that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world – but it also demonstrated exactly what we desired in a partner: commitment to both innovation and our long-term success,” said William Aguirre, general manager of satellite operations at Televisa.

“Our internal team sourced our hardware provider Siselectron to provide a powerful SR1 device (2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor) and work on the customization for our specific needs. From there, we knew we wanted software and hardware partners agile enough to meet our present and future needs. Synamedia was quick to sign up and deliver and has been an instrumental part of the team, already demonstrating positive results. We’re thrilled with our choice.”

Synamedia’s MEG is a flexible, software-defined receiver with edge processing functions, such as transcoding, regionalization, time delay and blackout, across satellite, CDN and IP networks. The combination of Synamedia’s PowerVu distribution platform and MEG provides Televisa with secure content distribution, centralized control and edge processing to tailor content handoffs to meet the needs of affiliates and MVPDs. For Televisa, MEG helps ensure content is securely distributed due to Synamedia’s PowerVu conditional access, it said.

Earlier in April, one of Televisa’s largest stations went live with Synamedia MEG and PowerVu across Guadalaraja. The project will continue to roll out through summer 2024 and in stages for the next two years, to cover all stations in Mexico, the company said.

More information is available on the company’s website.

Phil Kurz

Phil Kurz is a contributing editor to TV Tech. He has written about TV and video technology for more than 30 years and served as editor of three leading industry magazines. He earned a Bachelor of Journalism and a Master’s Degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Journalism.