TIS 2015: Armstrong, SES Test Ultra HD

SES S.A. and Armstrong have teamed up on an Ultra HD trial that will deliver linear video in the 4K format.

For the multi-month trial, Armstrong is tapping SES’s “camera-to-screen” Ultra HD platform at the MSO's headquarters cable lab in Butler, Pa., to deliver the video via multicasting over DOCSIS 3.0. Multicasting, considered more bandwidth-friendly than unicast, is a technique that delivers a stream to a specific service group.

Content for the trial is encoded in HEVC/H.265, a compression scheme that's 50% more efficient than MPEG-4/H.264, at bit color and at 50 frames per second, according to Steve Corda, VP of business development for SES, which unveiled its UHD platform at the NAB confab in April. Armstrong, SES said, is the first to test its linear UHD solution “in a real-world environment.”

For the full story go to Multichannel.com.