Appear TV to Provide Industry’s First Universal Distribution Head-Ends

 

12 April 2011 

Appear TV, announced new products, including encoding and new satellite receiver modules, these mean that Appear TV is the first company able to provide customers with high density head-ends that can handle all the functionality required for distribution over cable, IP, satellite and terrestrial networks. 

By providing full flexibility over inputs, outputs, encoding and transcoding, Appear TV has produced a universal head-end that’s capable of taking any input and providing any output. This ‘anything to anything’ approach provides maximum flexibility, something that’s increasingly important as broadcast architectures gain in complexity. 

For instance a satellite operator choosing an Appear TV solution now has all the functionality it needs to handle a complete satellite uplink with a number of transponders from one single unit. With other vendors this would take a complete rack of equipment and additionally require a management system to provide equivalent functionality. 

Discussing this exciting new development, Carl-Walter Holst, CEO, Appear TV, said: “Our approach has always been to enable customers to build bespoke head-ends based on a chassis with core functionality augmented by specific modules. The NAB 2011 preview of encoding modules means that we can now produce an entire head-end in one chassis – and we can do it with total flexibility.” 

“Customers have been asking us for encoding for some time. Although we already provided more of the distribution solution than other vendors, without encoding we were one piece short of the entire jigsaw. Our approach saves space and greatly simplifies operations through integrating a management system with the enormous feature-set of our head-ends. And with encoding now in place, Appear TV head-ends uniquely provide everything required to get on air, making us the only delivery partner a broadcaster ever needs,” concluded Holst.