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Big Ten Chooses T-VIPS JPEG2000-based HD Gateways for Video Transport of Top US College Sports Oslo, Norway – January 28 2010 T-VIPS, a global leader in professional video contribution and distribution, creating award-winning solutions that make the transport of high quality broadcast video easier and more cost-effective, today announced that the Big Ten Network is using T-VIPS JPEG2000-based HD Gateways TVG 430 for the contribution of live sports, including basketball, volleyball and hockey over IP networks to its hedquarters in Chicago. The Big Ten Network is the first nationally distributed television network dedicated to covering one of the nation’s premier collegiate conferences, and is a joint venture between subsidiaries of the Big Ten Conference and Fox Cable Networks. “Big Ten Network Engineering and Fox NEO performed an extensive technical evaluation along with field trials at the Universities. The high video quality and error-resiliency over an IP network of the T-VIPS TVG 430 made it a stand-out solution for our sports contribution,” says Mike Wilken, Chief Engineer for the Big Ten Network. “The TVG 430 has made the production of our Student U events economical while maintaining the highest HD quality.” The Big Ten Network televises more than 350 live events, the vast majority in high definition, as well as studio shows, original programming and classic games and is available to more than 75 million homes in the U.S. and Canada. The Big Ten Conference, the nation’s oldest, is comprised of 11 world-class universities located in eight states around the Midwest. It members, all NCAA Division I universities, include Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin. “Our partnership with the Big Ten Network builds upon the success we have achieved in the sport broadcasting fraternity and illustrates the clear advantages of our JPEG2000-based video gateways,” said Johnny Dolvik, CEO, T-VIPS. “Having seen the advantages, including the cost-effectiveness, ease-of-use of and flexibility of our TVG430’s, the Big Ten Network continues to increase the number of units deployed in its network. Not only do we enable Big Ten Network to take advantage of cost-effective networks, we also ensure that the quality of contributed video is high. For example, unlike transport solutions based on a MPEG codec, we support 10-bit video, minimize latency and have industry leading error resiliency characteristics. I look forward to ensuring that Big Ten Network’s coverage of U.S. college sports remains of the highest possible quality.” T-VIPS in Sports Video Tranpsort T-VIPS has enjoyed particular success in sports video transport with its JPEG2000-based video gateways. JPEG2000 provides many advantages over MPEG-based solutions, including higher 10-bit video quality, low latency, outstanding error resiliency characteristics, and flexibility, ease-of-use and remote monitoring and control. Because sports coverage contains high-speed motion with rapid scene shifts and lots of camera movement, it maximizes stress on compression schemes. In addition, the high value of sports content means it is more important than ever that consumers see the highest-quality television signal possible and with minimum delay. Furthermore, sports content is often broadcast on a large number of channels in many geographical regions as well as over mobile TV networks and streamed over the Internet, which requires a source signal that is suitable for editing, format conversion and transcoding. The T-VIPS range of video gateways, augmented with the IBC 2009 launch of the next generation JPEG2000-based TVG450 solution, has been designed to provide the sports industry with solutions that meet all of these requirements and in addition can be easily integrated with all broadcast systems and workflows. The Big Ten Network contract builds on T-VIPS’ success in sports, including the delivering of UK Premier League soccer to Scandinavia, the transport of ice hockey programming within Sweden and Finland and a number of backhaul systems live in the USA. |
