PLAZAMEDIA chooses Snell & Wilcox MEMPHIS HD encoders

No fewer than three Snell & Wilcox MEMPHIS encoders have gone live at PLAZAMEDIA to enable flexible, high-quality ingest and mastering for PREMIERE PHILIPS HD SPORT, a dedicated HDTV sports channel from PREMIERE, Germany’s largest pay-TV platform.
The new PREMIERE HD sports channel, featuring soccer, ice hockey, basketball, and other international sports highlights and events, is among the first special programming channels to be offered in Germany and Austria.
“Continuous high definition presentation of popular sports programming from around the world demands reliability and quality,” said PLAZAMEDIA Head of Technology Chris Wieland. “The MEMPHIS encoder met our stringent standards for performance and picture quality and integrated smoothly with our Omneon Spectrum server system.”
Installed at PLAZAMEDIA’s Ismaning playout facility, the MEMPHIS HD encoders provide efficient ingest of 720p50/1080i50 and 720p60/1080i59.94 sports content from Europe and the United States. In addition to SD and HD 1080/720 formats, the MEMPHIS accepts uncompressed PCM, MP1L2, Dolby E, and AC-3 audio, and can encode at any MPEG-2 profile including 4:2:0 and 4:2:2, CBR/VBR, and I-Frame/Long GOP up to 175 Mbps.
The Snell & Wilcox MEMPHIS HD encoder uses the SMPTE 302M standard for audio encoding to embed both compressed and noncompressed audio streams into the MPEG-2 output, which is then captured, stored, and automatically routed at playout by the facility’s Omneon Spectrum media server system. Exceptional picture quality is made possible by Snell & Wilcox’s Emmy Award-winning Ph.C phase correlation motion estimation and Prefix compression preprocessing technologies. Integrated signal preconditioning and phase correlation motion estimation enable the MEMPHIS to generate the motion vectors so critical to pristine images in fast-moving sports coverage.
PLAZAMEDIA’s store of Snell & Wilcox gear also includes an Alchemist Ph.C standards converter and two Ukon universal conversion platforms, which the company is using to upconvert archive material and other footage for HD broadcast. The Ukon also enables downconversion of HD programming for distribution via SD channels.
“We have worked with Snell & Wilcox conversion technologies for about a decade, and they have operated reliably, without a glitch, despite continuous operation,” continued Wieland. “We’re very pleased to be relying on Snell & Wilcox solutions once again for playout of PREMIERE’s innovative HD sports programming.”
(GB)