Multichoice Group selects Grass Valley’s DVB-H solution

Grass Valley has been selected by Multichoice Group, the largest satellite broadcaster in Africa, to provide the headend and service platform for the delivery of 20 television and radio services to mobile devices, using the DVB-H system.
Multichoice sees offering compelling content to mobile handsets as an important part of widening its offer to its customers.
Leveraging its unparalleled expertise in the digital broadcast market and in the management of digital television services, Grass Valley will provide Argos H.264 mobility encoders, Opal IP encapsulators and the Smartvision Mobility TV service platform to perform the content aggregation, video compression and encapsulation, generation of the the Electronic Service Guide and service delivery. Grass Valley’s Smartvision Mobility solution offers the flexibility to handle content provisioning, terminals management and service delivery.
The system provided by Grass Valley for Multichoice will first cover the Durban, Cape Town, Pretoria and Johannesburg regions in South Africa. Multichoice intends to quickly promote its new mobility service by providing live content from the FIFA World Cup Soccer 2006.
“Grass Valley supplied Multichoice with its DVB-S satellite delivery platform, and we turned to them again for a turnkey solution for DVB-H,” said Gerdus van Eeden, Chief Technology Officer at MultiChoice.“After thorough evaluation of various solutions on the market, it was a no-brainer: superior picture performance of its H.264 encoder, very advanced service management with SmartVision, and full compatibility with our Irdeto conditional access software.
“Add to that the reliability and performance of the Grass Valley ViBE DVB-S platform already in operation at Multichoice and its dedicated customer support. We will pioneer DVB-H as we did pioneer DVB-S, and to achieve this goal we renewed our confidence in Grass Valley as a long term technology partner.”
(GB)