TANDBERG Television announces that its iPlex UltraCompression IPTV head-end has been selected by Swisscom for the next step of its Bluewin IPTV service. Swisscom and TANDBERG Television commenced their collaboration with the trial of the Bluewin IPTV system in autumn 2004, followed by commercial deployment in November 2006. Now the companies are working together to ensure that Swisscom can continue to provide a world-class IPTV service to it customers, through leveraging TANDBERG Television’s broadcast expertise and its award-winning iPlex UltraCompression high definition and standard definition system. The solution offers a range of advanced video processing features with bandwidth improvements of up to 50%, industry leading density and improved video quality.

"TANDBERG Television has been our partner throughout our IPTV journey and we are pleased to continue to work with them as we enter the next stage of our development. TANDBERG Television has pioneered advanced compression, lowering the bandwidth required for delivering television over DSL and enabling IPTV business models to become a reality. We are deploying TANDBERG Television’s best-in-class technology to enable the expansion of our IPTV service and continuously improving its quality, while still maintaining flexibility and efficiency,” says Dr Felix Graf, Head of TV & Portal at Swisscom.

Swisscom's Bluewin TV service offers over 120 TV channels, more than 80 radio channels, over 500 top films (on demand), live sports coverage and up to 30 Teleclub channels. At the touch of a button users can search for and record programs, select for later viewing or pause programs during transmission. Customers are free to decide what to watch and when. All they need is a phone line with broadband Internet access. Swisscom's launch of Bluewin TV is in line with the company's "Triple Screen" vision (television viewing on a TV set, computer and mobile phone).

“Swisscom was one of the early movers in IPTV and we are proud to have been associated with the Bluewin TV service from trial to commercial deployment,” says Eric Baron, President of TANDBERG Television EMEA. “Our next-generation iPlex IPTV head-end will enable Swisscom to benefit from advanced solutions such as increased density, improved bandwidth management and enhanced picture quality, while at the same time future-proofing their infrastructure with features such as transcoding and a simple upgrade path to HD.”

Being demonstrated at IBC, the iPlex UltraCompression HD and SD IPTV head-end product is based on TANDBERG Television’s world first, next-generation AVC platform and provides a step change in digital video distribution by combining the broadest choice of density and enhanced features with the industry’s leading picture quality performance. The TANDBERG iPlex is a flexible video processing platform, rather than just being an encoder chassis, and offers the industry’s most complete IPTV head-end video processing solution that includes MPEG-2 SD encoding, MPEG-4 AVC HD and SD encoding, MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 transcoding, MPEG-2 transrating, and picture-in-picture service generation in a high density, NEBS-certified, telco-designed chassis.