By Crispin MacIntosh, October 20, 2004
TANDBERG Television announced that it has secured the contract to provide IPTV decoding, encoding and streaming solutions to Sistema, the largest private sector consumer services company in Russia and an active player in the Russian telecommunications market. The agreement will see TANDBERG Television provide a range of solutions to enable the delivery of broadcast quality television and video services over ADSL to Sistema's residential customers. The system will be delivered and installed in November 2004. The multimedia project being implemented by Sistema Mass Media, Sistema's media arm, is one of the largest broadband projects in the world and will provide a wide range of users in Moscow and the Russian regions with advanced broadband entertainment services, including interactive TV, video on demand, multimedia games, high-speed internet access and e-commerce.
Ninety channels of video content will be delivered from Moscow over the ADSL network. Content is being sourced from satellite feeds, tapes and local servers, and a key network design challenge is the requirement to decode MPEG-2 video feeds and provide Gigabit Ethernet IP streams, while maintaining picture quality and bandwidth efficiency.
TANDBERG Television has been developing solutions for the IPTV market for over five years and has harnessed its extensive TV delivery experience, based on building many of the world’s largest Pay-TV systems
. The company’s solutions include products that have been designed specifically for the television over IP market and that have already been deployed by over twenty telco and fiber operators around the world.
A range of TANDBERG Television solutions are being deployed in the Sistema network, including TT1260 professional receivers that feed the video streams to the award-winning TANDBERG TT7116 IP Streamer. Each TT7116 IP Streamer in the system includes 10 TANDBERG E5 encoding cards that allow for bit-rate reduction of the streams to meet the low bandwidth capacity of the ADSL network. All parts of the system have full redundancy and are controlled by the management system, with monitoring based on the TANDBERG TT1260 with integrated IP input and the TANDBERG TT4010 transport stream analyzer.
Alcatel recently announced that it had been selected by Sistema as prime contractor. Alcatel will provide integration, customization and installation services, as well as deliver its fully integrated Open Media Suite, the industry-leading middleware solution for delivery of rich media in a triple play service mix (voice, data, video).
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