Tandberg Aims to Bring Broadcast Quality TV to Broadband Cable

Reprinted from a Tandberg press release:

Lysaker, Norway, September 26, 2001 - TANDBERG Television, a leading
provider of open solutions for digital broadcasting, continued its strategy
to bridge the broadcast and broadband worlds with the IBC debut of its new
broadband solutions for Cable, DSL and IP networks. TANDBERG Television’s
broadband architecture leverages the company’s broadcast heritage to bring
broadcast quality television services into the all-important IP ‘triple
play’ mix of high-speed Internet, telephony and TV. The system has already
been deployed in significant broadband IP TV trials and has the advantage of
being flexible and scalable, enabling delivery systems to start with
thousands of users and grow to millions.

At IBC 2001, TANDBERG Television will show its combined broadband/cable
head-end delivering live broadcast quality programming over IP to both TV
screens and personal computers. TANDBERG Television will also launch its
TANDBERG Portal Tools software at IBC with applications such as content
extraction and Meta data insertion. The tools enable the repurposing of
content to meet broadband protocol requirements. For example, to deliver a
multi-channel TV service, operators need to be able to have an Electronic
Programming Guide to help viewers find what they want to watch. In the
broadcast world the program markers of scheduling are called Service
Information (SI). In the broadband world this SI needs to be converted to
XML format for use on a browser style EPG.

The TANDBERG Television broadband architecture is based on a Content
Streaming Headend platform that takes in MPEG-2 video and audio feeds,
encodes or descrambles them and then repurposes the content into IP format
for multi-casting over the broadband IP network. The system provides a
complete digital turnaround solution and can receive, decode, descramble and
process transmissions from a digital satellite transponder, digital cable
head-end or digital terrestrial transmitter to provide national and regional
TV services to consumers on broadband networks. A number of TANDBERG
Television products are included in the broadband system:
* TANDBERG Television’s new range of flexible, compact encoders
* The TT7116 IP Streamer, which takes the MPEG-2 stream, consisting of a
multiplex of digital TV programs, and splits the stream into single program
streams, which are then transmitted as IP Multicast sessions over the
broadband network;
* Digital turnaround facilities with features such as Bit-Rate Changing to
support the seamless management of incoming multi-channel feeds, to insert
local content, apply conditional access and create outgoing multiplexes for
transmission across broadband networks;
* Super to Regional headend transmission flexibility over ATM or IP;
* Two-way interactive services with return-path solutions based on Cisco,
Liberate and Pace systems.