South America’s Global Media Expands DTH Satellite Service

Paris (France) – The premiere South America’s direct-to-home satellite TV platform Global Media, has added 10 new digital channels, using Thomson (Euronext Paris: 18453; NYSE: TMS) solutions.
As part of the significant new agreement, Thomson will also manage the installation and provide maintenance and training services.

The new Thomson ViBE encoders (H.264) and Thomson processor equipment (NetProcessor™) has recently been installed at Global Media’s headend facility in Colombia, to manage the audio and video elements supporting 10 standard-definition (SD) channels using MPEG-4 compression while also tightly integrating with conditional access software. A Thomson eXtensible Management System (XMS) will control the entire system.

“Thomson’s ViBE products help us get the most out of the bandwidth we have in the most cost-effective way with the highest quality,” said Juan Carlos Ceballos, Technical Manager, at Global Media. “We’ve been able to launch these new channels very quickly, which will provide us with a quick return on investment. All of our goals for this project have been achieved with the help of Thomson. We’re very pleased with the results.”

“With Thomson ViBE MPEG-4 encoders, Global Media has been able to do something unheard of in the MPEG-2 world, namely add additional channels within their existing limited bandwidth without sacrificing quality,” said Patrick Montliaud, Vice president of Thomson Integration and Network Solutions, within the Systems division. “By using Thomson’s solutions, Global Media’s subscribers can now benefit from a 30% increase in channel carriage as the number of available channels increases from 8 to 10 premium quality channels, using the same available bandwidth”.

The Thomson NetProcessor will be used as a multiplexer and will allow Global Media to insert local content, advertising, logos, IDs, and emergency messages into the various channels as necessary.

The Thomson XMS system offers a suite of software tools for controlling and monitoring any digital television system, enabling users to configure, control, and monitor their SD and high-definition (HD) services through an intuitive graphical interface.

Global Media has also chosen the Thomson eXtended Mediation Unit (XMU) mediation unit, which is being used to manage the dozens of ViBE digital content delivery platform products being put in place.