Sportscaster ESPN Star Sports (ESS) has selected SeaChange International‘s Broadcast MediaCluster video server system for on-air delivery of television programming to viewers in 25 countries including India.
Over 360 hours of broadcast material will be stored on the stand-alone video server system and it will deliver eight regional television channels in English, Hindi, Mandarin and Cantonese. ESPN Star Sports‘ Broadcast MediaCluster deployment will be live at the end of August, says an official release.

ESS says it chose Broadcast MediaCluster on the basis of around-the-clock reliability, simple expandability and unique storage protection. More than 500 field staff throughout Asia capture sports content for ESS network programming, which emanates from a 60,000 square-foot, state-of-the-art production and transmission facility in Singapore. Here, SeaChange‘s Broadcast MediaCluster takes the role of on-air server. The operator has also taken on board a new Encoda Automation system, which has been integrated with SeaChange video server systems in customer deployments around the world.
SeaChange‘s Broadcast MediaClusters are comprised of `server nodes,‘ which leverage it‘s patented RAID2 ("raid squared") architecture to scale gracefully in storage and I/O capacity, while providing the only single copy, 100% fault-resilient video server in the broadcast market. ESPN Star Sports‘ choice, the Broadcast MediaCluster 1650 series, uses as many as 16 disk drives per server node and delivers over 40 I/Os in a seven-node configuration.

Says ESS director of engineering Andy Rylance, "Singapore is a hotbed of technologically advanced television operations that reach out across Asia. Through numerous noteworthy deployments here, SeaChange and its partner Magna Systems have earned a solid reputation for cost-performance and local service. We surveyed a number of approaches for our on-air content playback and SeaChange‘s Broadcast MediaCluster really came out strongest on our top criteria - the ability to withstand any frame failure without any extended interruption to our services."

SeaChange International claims to be the world leader in digital video systems that are changing television.

While broadcasters, MSOs, cable ops and consumers grapple the possibilities and frailties of CAS in India, set top box manufacturers are dealing with the more practical aspects of the system.
DALVI, a six-year-old encryption systems company that‘s looking to be a major player in the conditional access market in the country, is one such. The company that has been in talks with MSOs and cable ops for the last two years has already migrated from having a linear power supply to a switch mode power supply in order to cater for voltage variation within India. The company has also had to develop and deploy a fingerprinting functionality to help combat the use of illegal signals being transmitted throughout the country, says DALVI‘s business development manager Lewis Zimbler. This functionality enables the operator to make any decoder transmit a number on the TVs that it is feeding signals to, he says.

Manufacturers also have to reduce prices to enable them to compete in the Indian marketplace, by using strategic Indian partners and using Indian manufacture. While DALVI currently operates only for analogue systems, digital systems are also being simultaneously developed, says Zimbler. The DALVI system encoders can readily interface with standard video modulators used in SMATV, CATV, VHF/UHF and MMDS so making upgrading to DALVI simpler, he says.

The DALVI system uses an in-band addressing system such that a single HeadEnd can service any form of RF network, i.e., terrestrial, HFC, Coax, MMDS and Satellite or a combination of any transmission media. This means that an operator can have total control from a single location for a variety of networks. The system caters for 99 scrambled channels, offers 48 tiers, can control any number of headends from a single location and supports Pay Per View.

The company has tied up with Catvision Products for distribution and is already in discussions with partners for setting up its own STB manufacturing facility in India.

Direct-to-home (DTH) broadcasting is coming. Take it as a given. Subhash Chandra‘s ASC Enterprises Ltd (Agrani) has applied for a DTH licence.Confirming this to indiantelevision.com, Punit Goenka, group president and CEO, said ASC had made an official application to government for starting DTH operations in India on Monday.

The application comes at a time when the government is reported to be considering a proposal to lift the 20 per cent foreign direct investment (FDI) cap in DTH ventures to 49 per cent. (Check out the report on 24 June on indiantelevision.com): Indian government proposes to remove FDI and cross media irritants in DTH once again: is it the real thing this time?).

It needs to be noted that the very next day of the report‘s appearance, information and broadcasting minister Sushma Swaraj denied any such move on the part of the government.

Agrani‘s is the second application for a DTH licence after the News Corp-backed Space TV put in its own application in April. However, the government rejected the application because Space TV put in a number of riders, one of which was that the 20 per cent FDI cap should be lifted.

Watch this space for further details.