Fifteen years after the launch of the company’s digital satellite newsgathering (DSNG) product, Ericsson has released its fifth generation Voyager II. The product underlines the important of live news and sport alongside event television as key planks of linear broadcasting.
“This addresses a market in which we’ve historically been strong, we invented the first DSNG unit 15 years ago, and many of the original members are still a part of the team, Fabio Murra, a product manager in Ericsson’s TV solution area, told Broadband TV News.
Voyager II is built on a ‘hot-swappable’ 1RU chassis with color input confidence monitoring, it features a fully redesigned intuitive front panel user interface, developed following industry feedback. It is the first solution to use MPEG-4 AVC 4:2:2 encoding with 10-bit precision at up to 1080p50/60 resolutions to the DSNG market.
Murra explained Voyager II had been completely redesigned and was not encoder centric. It supports 3D applications, but ostensibly had been built with all content source in mind as they make their way through the broadcast chain. “The multitude of devices is increasing, but the highend is getting higher, which means the starting point has to get higher too,” he said. “The market is going so fast we need to be able to do MPEG-2 today, MPEG-4 tomorrow and MPEG-4 after that.”
Murra said Voyager II could offer efficiency improvements of between 30 and 50% on Ericcson’s own E5780 unit.
In 1995 the industry’s first MPEG-2 DSNG solution saved broadcasters satellite bandwidth as they sent the first digital video pictures from the field. The first MD MPEG-2 demonstrations followed in 1998 with MPEG-4 AVC HD following in 2004.
Voyager II will make its public debut at NAB, Las Vegas April 11-14, 2011 and CCBN, Beijing, March 23-25, 2011.
