An undisclosed North American satellite broadcaster awarded Tandberg Television the first announced MPEG-4 AVC HDTV video headend contract valued at $9 million. The contract also includes Tandberg’s EN5990 encoder in fully redundant systems plus its Reflex statistical multiplexing software. Most of the equipment will be delivered in the first half of this year, Tandberg said.

Support of MPEG-4 advanced video coding throughout broadband infrastructure is critical to the delivery of HDTV over lower-bandwidth broadband, such as ADSL2+, and thus key to the triple play business plans of companies who can not dish up FTTx with the tens of megabits per second that currently standard MPEG-2 requires for just a couple of video streams. The industry standard MPEG-4 and Microsoft’s rival proprietary video compression technology deliver HDTV at half the MPEG2 bandwidth, enabling HDTV to be delivered over broadband at speeds under 10 Mb/s. For satellite transmissions, where the bandwidth constraints are more severe than terrestrial systems, the value of MPEG-4 is obvious.