Belgian Broadcasters Upgrade To HD

The national broadcaster in Belgium for the Flemish speaking community, VRT, is upgrading its broadcast facility to HD with Miranda's NVISION 8280 Enterprise Class router.
VRT originally launched a temporary HD channel, called Eén HD, in July 2008 to offer live HD coverage of the Tour de France and the Summer Olympics.
In early 2009, VRT expanded its broadcasting capabilities, offering two main channels (Eén and Canvas) in HD.
The broadcast expansion plan includes the NVISION 8280 router and upgrading all systems to support HD (720p50).
All of the internal video distribution will be performed by the router, making it possible to switch every video signal to every location in the facility studio.
The first studio is already on the air, and the second studio is scheduled to go live in Q1 2010.
"Redundancy was a critical element in the video chain," said Steven Van Doorsselaer, VRT's Project Engineer.
"We chose the NVISION 8280 because its crosspoint redundancy design provides a zero downtime capability, with a back-up system for the largest possible impact block in the router," he said.
"Also, the future proof design and the ability to exchange cards makes the router very robust and easy to upgrade and maintain."
The routers feature exceptional resilience, scalability, and control flexibility. They are designed for absolute dependability, with full power supply, controller and crosspoint redundancy.
Available in sizes up to 1152 x 1152 video inputs, they provide unmatched signal path integrity for improved return loss and cable length performance.
(BMcC/GK)