Tandberg Television has disclosed that it has received an order for an MPEG-4 video head-end for an as yet unnamed leading European telecommunications company.
The contract, worth over 4 million Euro, is to provide a standard definition MPEG-4 video head-end for a television over broadband service expected to go live in the summer.
The Tandberg EN5930 encoding system will support the ingest and delivery of video using the MPEG-4 part 10 (H.264/AVC) standard. This provides video encoding that takes up around half the bandwidth of MPEG-2 used by most broadcasters, and allows video to be delivered across broadband networks for IPTV or internet protocol television services.
The adoption of MPEG-4 by a leading European telco is significant. While MPEG-4 has been favoured by some broadcasters for future high-definition television services, Microsoft appears to have found favour with some telcos for its competing WM9/VC1 compression scheme.