“At the moment we are broadcasting test versions of three HD channels and we are going to make them available to subscribers in late March”, says Dmitry Samokhin CEO of NTV-Plus.
NTV-Plus is the leading direct-to-home (DTH) satellite service provider in Russia and the Ukraine with more than 550,000 subscribers. NTV-Plus airs a mixture of Russian, self-produced, as well as international channels, including 10 news channels, 18 movie channels, 13 sports channels, 11 educational channels, several musical and children’s channels.
To enable the new HD service and save capacity on its MPEG 2 compressed standard definition service NTV-Plus is deploying Harmonic’s Electra 7000 MPEG-4 HD encoders, Electra 1000 MPEG-2 SD encoders, DiviTrackIP statistical multiplexing and NMX Digital Service Manager. According to Oleg Kolesnikov, NTV-Plus’ Technical Director, “Harmonic’s DiviCom Electra encoders and DiviTrackIP statistical multiplexing solution significantly reduced our bit-rate requirements for both HD H.264 and SD MPEG-2 services, facilitating expansion of the local and international programming we can offer”.
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