This week Telekom Austria Group completed the upgrade of its white-label DTH platform to H.265 encoding for the Czech and Slovak markets. All video streams on the “direct2home” platform for these two markets are now being encoded with High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) for the audio streams. For this major transition to be achieved, the DTH pay-TV operators in Czech Republic and Slovakia, running their services on direct2home, had to exchange the complete install base of their set-top-boxes with HEVC-ready ones.
The direct2home platform, along with its local pay-TV partners in Czech Republic and Slovakia, are now the first HEVC DTH platforms in Europe. The HEVC and HE-AAC deliver not only more efficient utilization of the satellite capacity, but they also improve significantly the video and audio quality. The HEVC-migration of direct2home allows for the addition of more HD and UHD content on the platform, resulting into even a more compelling channels line-up on direct2home for the Slovak and Czech Republic markets.
“We announced the launch of our white-label direct2home platform exactly four years ago during IBC. Being the new-comer in the industry has had its own advantages. It has allowed us to adopt agile business models and partner with the most innovative and advanced technology vendors. Now, four years later, we are proud to announce that we operate the first HEVC DTH platform in Europe, we enable five DTH pay-TV operators on direct2home and host more than 1 million records on our multi-tenant Conditional Access System.”, says Stanislav Georgiev, Head of Media Broadcasting, Telekom Austria Group.
Telekom Austria Group’s HEVC platform is based on the Electra X2 Advanced Media Processor technology from Harmonic.
