TANDBERG Television is set to build on its business and technology lead in the Asian IPTV video head-end market with a demonstration of its full suite of live, on-demand and interactive solutions at IPTV World Forum Asia 2006 (stand 83), which runs 27th - 29th September in Shanghai. The event will give delegates the chance to see why the annual IPTV leadership report, published earlier this month by the Multimedia Research Group (MRG), ranked TANDBERG Television as the leading IP video head-end supplier in Asia, as well as in EMEA and rest of world. Worldwide TANDBERG Television has been involved in more than 160 xDSL and FTTH deployments and there are over 2 million subscribers currently viewing IPTV thanks to the company's technology.

"Asia has always been a very important market for us," says Graham Cradock, TANDBERG Television's EVP and General Manager, Asia Pacific. "According to research from In-Stat the Asia-Pacific IP video services market will grow nearly 80 per cent per year between now and 2010, with Asia accounting for half of all worldwide IPTV subscribers by the end of 2009. We've been working with IPTV operators in the region for over five years and our market-leading technology is allowing telcos to deploy IPTV services right across the continent, from Dubai to Osaka and from Delhi to Shanghai."

Jim Olson, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development, TANDBERG Television will deliver a keynote speech: Beyond IPTV - Why Plain Old Television Won't Cut it for Telcos at 9:10 on 29th September at IPTV World Forum Asia.

TANDBERG Television will showcase its fully integrated IPTV head-end product line, which provides the industry's widest selection of encoding and video processing technologies for streaming, transrating, transcoding, ultracompression and high density encoding. The company comes to IPTV World Forum Asia following its launch of next-generation high definition (HD) and standard definition (SD) MPEG-4 AVC encoding solutions at IBC 2006. The move continues TANDBERG Television's market-leading momentum in the MPEG-4 AVC arena and brings a step change in digital video distribution by combining the broadest choice of density and enhanced features with the industry's leading 'picture quality versus performance' through bandwidth improvements of up to 50% over currently deployed MPEG-4 AVC units.

TANDBERG Television's next-generation encoding solutions enable expanded telco TV business models, including the delivery of 2 full-resolution HDTV channels over ADSL2+@2km. The next-generation compression platform is being launched simultaneously across the TANDBERG encoding family with the introduction of the new EN8030 MPEG-4 AVC SD and EN8090 MPEG-4 AVC SD/HD ultracompression broadcast encoders, alongside the introduction of new MPEG-4 AVC HD and SD ultracompression encoding modules for the Plex range of high density, multi-channel encoders.

The TANDBERG Television stand will also feature a demonstration of the Cable and Satellite International Product of the Year award winner, the RX1290, TANDBERG Television's latest professional receiver and the world's first professional multi-format MPEG-2/MPEG-4 AVC decoder designed for the high-end contribution market.

TANDBERG Television's solutions can be applied to IPTV applications based on ADSL, VDSL, FTTH or Ethernet delivery to the subscriber. Using TANDBERG Television's innovative technology, a number of major clients around the world have successfully deployed IP-based video content services. These include Asian operators such as:

• PCCW - over 500,000 subscribers in Hong Kong, PCCW operates the world's largest IPTV service called NOW Broadband TV.
• Shanghai Telecom - using MPEG-4 AVC video compression for the deployment of IPTV for Shanghai Telecom and the Shanghai Media Group.
• On Demand TV - a joint venture of NTT West (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone West Corp.) and Itochu - has recently expanded its deployment of TANDBERG Television's Mediaplex-20™-based video head-ends to support MPEG-4 AVC technology for its nationwide IPTV rollout in Japan.