Tandberg Television announced March 21 that it is providing the video compression systems to enable China’s first national high definition (HD) TV roll-out. The HD video delivery system is based on the company’s E5780 MPEG-2 HD encoder.

The new HDTV service is being deployed to provide a television infrastructure for China offering movies, TV series, documentaries and 3-dimensional animated pictures.

HD is the immediate future for Chinese broadcasting, with the upcoming 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing already being hailed as the High-Definition Games. Additionally, the Chinese government has set a deadline of 2015 for switch off of analog broadcasting.