[SatNews] Enhanced quality and bandwidth efficiency will soon occur...

ATEME announced that the new IP video network deployed by SKY Italia between Rome and Milan will use its contribution encoders and decoders for enhanced quality and bandwidth efficiency. The multi-channel service will span more than 4 Points of Presence initially, and will be used for content exchange across sites, primary distribution, and disaster recovery. A true multi-class service, the network integrated by CVE for SKY Italia is based on 10 Gbps and 2 Gbps circuits supporting low delay uncompressed video feeds on the optical layer, together with JPEG2000 and MPEG-4 compressed feeds over IP. All these services maintain a consistent 10-bit accuracy for video coding, thus avoiding any color gradient distortions from the transmission. “The efficiency of the ATEME MPEG-4 4:2:2 10-bit compression allows SKY Italia to increase the number of channels transmitted while keeping the same backbone. Extra capacity will always be available on short notice by simply moving services to a higher compression efficiency” says Massimo Bertolotti, Head of Platform Engineering and Innovation at SKY Italia. Sky Italia is the Italian pay-TV owned by News Corporation Limited. Launched in 2003, it has grown so rapidly as to reach 4,920,000 subscribers, as of March, 2011.