ABS-CBN Kapamilya Information Feature for January 2009

Digital Television

ABS-CBN recently applied for a digital television-terrestrial service (DTT) license to the National Telecommunications Commission. Digital Television in the Philippines will utilize the DVB-T standard utilized in most of Europe. The Dutch company Impeq Technologies is one of ABS-CBN's consultants in the digital transition. The network is planning to also supply DTV boxes in areas where signal reception of Channel 2 is weak. Areas such as Valenzuela, Bulacan, Rizal, Cavite and Laguna are the potential market for the DTV set-top boxes. The Metro Manila market will receive DWWX-TV and DWAC-TV and the company's six other cable channels on the digital platform. It is unclear however if ABS-CBN or its sister channels will broadcast some of its programmes in high definition (HD) once it has digital channels. The National Telecommunications Commission will be giving television broadcast companies until December 31, 2015, to fully convert from analog to digital technology, in line with the worldwide shift towards the use of DTT in broadcasting.

EVS Technology

ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corporation celebrates its 55th anniversary, the media conglomerate marks a new milestone in Philippine broadcasting history by being the first to do tapeless TV production in and out of their studios.
The Kapamilya Network was the first among Philippine networks to recognize the digital trend in broadcasting by setting up a 100-percent non-linear post-production workflow. From 2003 to today, ABS-CBN has been increasing its number of editing and audio workstations and server storage to cope with the rising volume of content. With this development, the Philippines becomes the first country in Southeast Asia to go tapeless in TV production.
ABS-CBN has chosen EVS technology to migrate to a tapeless production workflow in their studios and Outside Broadcast vans.
The company will install 14 XT servers throughout their company for ingest of media, and IPDirector in their studios for control of these servers and for logging and browsing. Media transfer to Avid ISIS for post production will be done with EVS' XFile acting as a gateway. All media will be compressed in IMX for SD and DNxHD for HD, which makes all EVS equipment natively compatible with ABS-CBN's Avid post production system.
For studio production, three 4-channel XT servers controlled by IPDirector will be installed in ABS-CBN studios for ingest, content indexing, review, clipping, and transfer to temporary archive or to Avid ISIS for post production. Using IPDirector allows users to review multiple camera angles directly, making it easy to select the best one. Also, because this solution ingests media digitally, editors will be able to edit media immediately upon ingest, even while recording is still in process, rather than waiting for tapes to be digitized.
Outside the studio, ten OB Boxes, each consisting of an XT Spotbox and an XFile will used in the field for multi-camera capture on removable media. Six OB Boxes are SD only, while four are HD/SD switchable. Finally, one 6-channel HD/SD X with LSM and XFile will installed in the OB Van used for recording sports events. The XFile removable media drives provide a cost-effective met.

TBC Intergration

TBC Integration, Inc. a leading equipment distributor and integrator of satellite video networks and subscriber management systems has been selected by ABS-CBN International, the U.S. based subsidiary of ABS-CBN Broadcasting, to provide a new turnkey video system. TBC Integration will supply a state-of-the-art MPEG-4/H.264 video encoding, multiplexing, control, and transmission platform.
The new system allows ABS-CBN International to substantially boost video picture quality on its contribution channels delivered from Manila to North America - without having to increase its leased fiber bandwidth. TBC Integration will install the system in Manila, and replace ABS-CBNi's current MPEG-2 system with MPEG-4/H.264 encoding technology that can deliver better than 50% efficiency compared to MPEG-2 systems. ABS-CBN International also gains the flexibility to add new channels within its existing bandwidth.
ABS-CBN can gain from the MPEG-4 video compression and DVB-S2 satellite modulation technologies available in many of the products TBC Integration is shipping and installing today. TBC Integration's solution includes Thomson's ViBE EM 2000 SD MPEG-4 encoders, NetProcessor 9030 transport stream processor, XMS(TM) eXtensible Management System, and XMU eXtensible Management Unit for control and management. Extensive and easy to use management, monitoring, and control features in the design allow ABS-CBN to dynamically reconfigure program bit-rates and route signals to a satellite backup link in the event of a redundant fiber network disaster. A satellite-backup sub-system uses the latest in satellite DVB-S2 modulation technology for improved spectral efficiency.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABS-CBN#Digital_Television