Tiernan Inks Five New DTV Contracts; Eyes 'Mole' Challenge
ijumpstart.com
Looking to expand its already-large digital television service operations, Tiernan Communications took another step toward cementing its role as an industry leader by inking five new international contracts valued at more than $4 million.
And while the company continues to attract business, it's hoping that its services will pull other DTV customers away from various MPEG-2 solutions being offered, including the emerging "Mole" technology.
Tiernan's deals, which were announced the week of Feb. 9, included new contracts with RTR-Signal, a national broadcaster in Russia; Eletronica Ind-ustriale Telecommunications Technology, a cable TV operator in Italy; Wellbe Co. Ltd. and IGP, major broadcasters in China; and Teleglobe International Corp., in Reston, Va., which specializes in the distribution of MPEG-2 4:2:2 encoded video signals over ATM.
Through its MPEG-2 encoders and decoders, such as the TE-30 enocder with MCPC (multi-channel capability), and the TDR-777 Integrated Receiver/Decoder (IRD), Tiernan has demonstrated that broadcast-quality television signals can be maintained all the way to the home, which, in part, led to the recent deals. However, Tiernan's patented DTV technology, and its active participation in the standardization of MPEG-2, DVB, and other standards, have given the company in-roads to new business and, it believes, a leg up on emerging technologies, such as new MPEG-2 innovations like Mole technology.
Developed by a consortium of companies, including Snell & Wilcox, which hopes to license it to equipment makers like Tiernan, Mole technology enables an upstream encoder to generate an Information Bus by which meta-data (data that describes the bit stream) would be used by the downstream encoder to duplicate those compression decisions precisely, thereby eliminating concatenation-the introduction of artifacts and other defects that degrade picture quality.
"Snell & Wilcox is going to face a very tough sell with Mole technology," said Keith Dunford, vice president of Tiernan. "I feel that Mole is much too complicated to impose on broadcasters at a time when they are just getting their DTV operations off the ground." Considering its expense and complexity, Dunford likens Mole to "using a 28 pound hammer to drive in a two-inch nail."
The primary reason that Dunford feels that Mole is overkill is that digital signals are, by nature, precise, so DTV viewers will not have to tolerate the color drift or picture degradation associated with NTSC. "If you compress a video signal properly, within the MPEG structure, any concatenation that results will be so slight that it will not be discernible to the human eye," says Dunford, "MPEG-2 is a stable, proven technology that is here today. Mole is at least three years away from 'settling down' and broadcasters must start their DTV transition this November."
Offering a typical DTV (contribution/distribution) scenario to illustrate how MPEG-2 compression might be applied to DTV under ATSC, Dunford suggested that an HDTV camera's output, compressed to 360 Megabits, would be recompressed to 80 Mbps for back-haul (via fiber optics) to the network's operation center. There, that 80 Mbps signal would be further down-compressed to 45 Mbps for digital transmission to its affiliates.
The affiliates would decode the signal (back to broadband video), add their local station identifiers and spots, then re-encode that video to the 19.3 Megabit ATSC bitstream for digital transmission to the home.
In addition to being DVB and MPEG-2 compliant, Tiernan's MPEG-2 digital television equipment can handle ATSC's HDTV specifications, whether they are 720P or 1080i. The system may be controlled from the front-panel or using a PC, and the operation may be automated.
Along with content contribution and distribution, the multi-channel encoding capability of Tiernan's high-end encoders make them ideal for use in satellite transmission applications. A 6-channel Tiernan TE-30 encoder (with MCPC) was used by CBS to relay up to six broadcast-quality signals from Cuba, via a single 36 Megahertz transponder, as part of its coverage of the Pope's visit in February. (Tiernan, 619-587-0252) |
