Sky Italia to Demonstrate Ultra HD Content Delivery via Thomson Video Networks' HEVC Encoding Solution

Sky Italia, Italy's leading DTH satellite pay TV provider, is planning a trial demonstration of Ultra HD content delivery using the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) compression capabilities of Thomson Video Networks' encoding/transcoding platform. Sky Italia chose the ViBE VS7000 to create a real-world environment for end-to-end Ultra HD delivery, from content acquisition and transcoding in HEVC to delivery and display on 4K television sets.

"HEVC is the wave of the future for Ultra HD and 4K content delivery, but until very recently this type of demonstration was not possible because there were no viable solutions for creating a real-world workflow in an actual production environment," said Massimo Bertolotti, head of engineering and innovation, Sky Italia. "This has changed now that Thomson Video Networks is shipping its ViBE VS7000 with the ability to encode live and file-based content in HEVC."

Thomson Video Networks' ViBE VS7000 video system, one of the first implementations of the emerging HEVC compression standard, is designed to lower operators' OPEX for delivery of a wide range of convergent TV services including WebTV and OTT, as well as traditional IPTV and cable applications. Featuring the exclusive MediaFlex video operating system, the ViBE VS7000 video system combines Thomson's renowned next-generation compression platform with live, broadcast-quality encoding; innovative video preprocessing; and faster-than-real-time file transcoding.

The ViBE VS7000 will provide 4K file transcoding in HEVC, and Thomson Video Networks' Sapphire stream server will play out the Ultra HD HEVC-encoded content for display on Ultra HDTV sets.

"Sky Italia is the perfect partner with which to demonstrate to our joint customers and the media industry that Ultra HD is a technology whose time has come," said Christophe Delahousse, president of Thomson Video Networks. "As this demonstration will show, the advanced 4K HEVC encoding capabilities of our ViBE VS7000 make it the ideal platform for media companies as they adapt their operations for HD and Ultra HD content delivery on the full range of devices and networks."