MUMBAI: Wisconsin-based VideoPropulsion® Interactive Television, Inc. OTCVPTV and New Delhi-based MultiVirt India Pvt Ltd are now demonstrating a new, low-cost headend system for Local Cable television Operators (LCOs) in India.
MultiVirt India as a company was established in 1995 to cater to the growing markets of broadcast, cable and multimedia in India. MultiVirt's core competency has been consultancy, systems integration and turnkey project execution for broadcast, Cable and OTT, mobile and web-media. VideoPropulsion has been a world leader in hardware and software for high performance, low cost per stream, digital content manipulation, and has established a reputation for providing unique HDTV, VoD, and IPTV products.
The two companies announced their collaboration early in 2015, and are now ready to deliver an inexpensive, innovative digital headend solution tailored specifically for the Indian digital CATV market.
The partners' premier offering is a MultiVirt integrated headend appliance capable of selectively receiving up to 200 channels of Free to Air (FTA) programming via DVB-S2 satellite, and then re-modulating the programs over QAM on a COAX network to DVB-C Set Top Boxes (STB). The single 4U chassis employs VideoPropulsion's preeminent, high-density DVB-C QAM modulator (ITU-T J.83 Annex A) PCIe cards.
The system has been designed for the LCO to optionally merge up to 40 of its own local programs into the COAX cable plant multiplex via an ethernet port on the appliance. The locally supplied content is encoded into MPEG2 or H.264, then transmitted to the VideoPropulsion QAM where it is combined with up to 200 FTA channels for delivery over the cable network to the subscribers' STBs. This makes for a very affordable 240 Channel headend, ideal for small, remote operators.
Additional options and upgrades include the ability to do hardware transcodes of any of the programs to or from MPEG2 or H.264, as well as the ability to encrypt any of the programs using a variety of conditional access schemes such as Conax, Novel-SuperTV, Cryptoguard, Irdeto, and others.
"Our new VPro-S Headend represents an exciting new opportunity for us to provide a large segment of CATV markets in India with a powerful and affordable solution," said MultiVirt founder & director Rakesh Gupta. "We are gratified to offer this high-density, low-priced product in support of the final phases of the digitation of television services in India." VideoPropulsion and Multipart will demonstrate the Vpro-S Headend on Booth E12 Hall12A at Convergence India 2017 (8-10 February) in New Delhi.
"Our ongoing partnership with MultiVirt showcases our ability to solve large-scale digital television problems quickly and cost-effectively," said VideoPropulsion founder, chairman and chief scientist Carl Pick. "We are delighted to participate in India's ambitious future."
