Virginia Public Television station has selected Streambox Inc. SBT3 encoding and decoding technology for distribution of real-time programming in the Washington, D.C. market.
WPVT had been unable to provide an acceptable off-air broadcast signal to the Washington D.C./Hagerstown, Md. DMA and was also unable to deliver content to Dish Network or DirecTV operation terminals. The station elected to distribute programming through a dedicated LAN, consisting of bonded T-1 copper landlines.
"We tested six different codec sets using our 'compression-buster' test, and none of the other solutions came close to the quality and functionality provided by Streambox," said Tony Mancari, WPTV's chief operations officer. "Unlike other systems, the Streambox gear produced video with few artifacts, passed closed captioning correctly and provided flexible output options without the need for external conversion gear. It performed flawlessly."
The Streambox encoder installed at WPVT takes the station's SDI stream, provides analog and digital monitoring outputs and sends separate signals to Dish Network and DirecTV, each of which is equipped with a Streambox decoder.
