Ascent Network Services Streams Wimbledon Live To New York

A leading provider of creative, technical and distribution services to the media and entertainment industries, Ascent Media, has announced that Ascent Network Services is currently streaming the 2009 Wimbledon Tennis Championship live for ESPN's on-demand internet service ESPN360.com.
Ascent Network Services London will receive coverage from all nine, match courts covered by the BBC and then feed them to New York via its Global Interconnect fibre network. By using its DTM based backbone with dual and diverse transatlantic routes, Ascent will be able to meet the demands of the high availability expected.
Ascent has increased its ability to downlink DVB-S2 services in London by purchasing four new satellite receivers to cover the needs required for ESPN. Already having the necessary fibre capacity, Ascent needed only to provision three new 30Mb paths between London and New York, with each 30Mb path carrying three courts at 10Mb's each.
Colin Pauling, Head of Network Operations, Ascent Media Group, commented: "This is a significant undertaking as previous work for ESPN has usually been to supply one or two live events simultaneously from London to New York and normally only for the duration of a football or rugby match. For Wimbledon, this has meant engineering a solution to downlink nine services of satellite and transport to New York for up to 12 hours a day for two weeks."
(KMcA/BMcC)