Red Bee Media Selects TANDBERG Television to Enable HD and SD On-Demand Entertainment

Deploys TANDBERG Xport® Digital Media Solutions for fast and efficient content ingest, editing and encoding

Southampton, UK, November 27th, 2006 - TANDBERG Television (TAT.OL) today announced that Red Bee Media has selected the TANDBERG Xport® Digital Media Solutions software to enable next-generation on-demand entertainment services. At its state-of-the-art Broadcast Centre in West London, Red Bee Media is installing two TANDBERG Xport Producer workstations that provide industry-leading encoding, editing and metadata management tools. The systems bring together TANDBERG Television’s best-in-class performance encoding technologies and its market-leading open standards based software solutions for on-demand and interactive television. They are the first in the world to support both high definition (HD) and standard definition (SD) MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC ingest and editing.

Red Bee Media provides specialist content versioning services to content owners/aggregators, broadcasters and operators to enable the delivery of on-demand entertainment across multiple video-on-demand (VOD) platforms. To achieve this Red Bee Media needs a highly efficient, reliable and advanced work system that converts video stored on tapes into compressed digital files, manages metadata, and supports HD and SD MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC and a number of specific customer encoding profiles.

“The appetite for on-demand and HD services is growing and our focus is to leverage advanced digital media technologies that enable our customers to fulfill the needs of their consumers. Clients demand an increasing number of encoding and digital compression formats so we have to meet these demands in an efficient way,” says Chris Howe, CTO of Red Bee Media.

The TANDBERG Xport system has been deployed in over 200 locations by leading customers including Comcast, Discovery, HBO, iN DEMAND, Starz-Encore and Time Warner Cable, as well as a number of operators in Europe. The Xport Producer is a comprehensive storage encoding solution that gives system operators a competitive edge, with the ability to easily encode, package and deliver content and advertising within their existing on-demand and linear broadcast systems. Assets can be utilized for VOD, NVOD, Barker, web, mobile and advertising systems.

“We are excited that our on-demand solutions have been selected by Red Bee Media for the expansion of its innovative services. In today’s digital media landscape, content owners and network operators are faced with an increasing volume of content and a proliferation of delivery platforms and consumer devices. Red Bee Media is enabling its customers to maximize these digital media opportunities through a fusion of creative origination and technical innovation,” says Eric Baron, President of EMEA at TANDBERG Television.

Xport Producer, complete with its modular packaging and distribution features, enables the enhancement and automation of encoding and metadata preparation processes and comes with a number of optional modules include storage encoding, transcoding, metadata creation, editing, validating, packaging, storing and exporting of on-demand and broadcast content. The additional MPEG Editor and MPEG Player modules provide the ability to edit and playback MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 AVC video stream files. Xport Producer is completely integrated with the TANDBERG MPEG-2, MPEG-4, SD and HD encoders.


About Red Bee Media
With over 1400 staff in London and its subsidiaries across the world and revenues in excess of £100 million, Red Bee Media is the largest playout and channel management business in the UK. It provides critical services to a number of broadcasters including the BBC, UKTV, Channel 4, Five, Flextech and ESPN. Formerly a commercial subsidiary of the British Broadcasting Corporation, Red Bee Media is now majority owned by Macquarie Capital Alliance Group, a fund managed by a member of the Macquarie Bank Group.


About TANDBERG Television
Whether it’s advanced compression systems, on-demand or interactive television, TANDBERG Television (TAT.OL) delivers the technology and expertise that is moving digital video forward. The company’s award-winning solutions are used by the world’s leading network operators, broadcasters and content owners to deliver new viewer experiences and advertising opportunities. With a broad suite of open, standards-based products, TANDBERG Television offers the highest quality digital TV solutions including IPTV, HDTV, video-on-demand, advertising on-demand, and interactive TV applications to customers in the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa. For more information, please visit www.tandbergtv.com.

Contact Information

Dwight Witherspoon

TANDBERG Television

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