TANDBERG Television announced that it has commenced the installation of an end-to-end IPTV delivery system for the commercial roll-out of the Swisscom/Bluewin triple play service. Swisscom has chosen the TANDBERG Television professional hardware encoding solution for Windows Media Video 9 (Microsoft's implementation of VC-1, the proposed SMPTE standard) following a competitive tender process. As part of the new contract TANDBERG Television will provide a number of its EN5920 encoders, TT1260 MPEG-2 professional receivers and an nCompass control and monitoring system and also support Swisscom’s engineering team with the integration of the video head-end with the Microsoft TV IPTV platform, set-top-boxes and other third party equipment.

"It is clear from our recent trials that to deliver a high quality commercial TV service we need to deploy the best video encoding solution available. We selected TANDBERG Television because of the high performance of its technology, as well as the company’s strong broadcast track record and ability to provide us with supportive systems integration expertise," says Michael Zumsteg, Head of Services of Swisscom Fixnet/Bluewin. "The TANDBERG EN5920 provides us with the ability to deliver broadcast quality TV at bit-rates as low as 1.5Mbt/s, a saving of approximately 50% when compared to traditional compression methods."

Swisscom and TANDBERG Television collaborated on the trials of the Bluewin IPTV system in late 2004. The results showed that the inclusion of a professional hardware advanced encoding solution was essential to enabling Swisscom to efficiently deliver a broadcast-quality real-time TV service as part of its ‘triple play’ offering to consumers in Switzerland.

"We are delighted to have been awarded this landmark advanced encoding contract from Swisscom. Swisscom has consistently been leading the way to IPTV, challenging the technology while maintaining a clear business plan. The contract not only shows that our development focus and investment in advanced encoding is well timed, but it also strongly confirms our ability to migrate trial customers into real-world commercial deployments," says Tim Sheppard, Director of Strategic Development at TANDBERG Television. "The bandwidth limitations inherent with existing DSL platforms create a challenge for operators in providing a broadcast quality video service to their customers. By deploying our EN5920 Windows Media Video 9 encoder, with its superior compression performance and operational benefits, operators can now offer broadcast quality TV and video on-demand services to their DSL customers."

The award-winning TANDBERG EN5920 is fully integrated with the Microsoft TV IPTV platform and supports the Windows Media Video 9 Advanced Profile codec, enabling DSL operators to offer live, broadcast television programming at lower data rates while maintaining broadcast-quality pictures. It is based on the TANDBERG Intelligent Compression Engine (ICE), a powerful and sophisticated video and audio compression platform that provides a modular and upgradeable solution for high quality implementations of standard definition and high definition Windows Media Video 9 and MPEG-4 AVC technologies.