Amino and Antena 3 announce the first delivery of a live national TV channel over an IP satellite data link in Spain. Using Amino’s AmiNET125 IPTV STB, La Fundación Antena 3, a non-profit charity supported by Grupo Antena 3, is broadcasting a new free to view channel called FAN3 in hospitals.

With the FAN3 channel, La Fundación Antena 3 helps children in hospitals to recover by offering information related to their specific illnesses and treatments. Furthermore, FAN3 educates children and teenagers by fostering good habits to protect their health in an educative and enjoyable manner. FAN3 is broadcasted from Monday to Friday and its programmes include conventional content such as TV movies, series, cartoons, as well as healthcare and educational information.

La Fundación Antena 3 enables hospitals to receive the programs from FAN3 via the Hispasat Satellite. The channel is received over a 2 Mbps one-way satellite link before being decoded with the AmiNET125. The feed is then modulated to an available channel number and made available to all TVs in the hospital.

Juan Carlos Sanchez-Rico Jiménez, Technical Maintenance Director, Antena 3, explained, “This is the first operative IP video distribution over a satellite link in Spain and the benefit for La Fundación is being able to use IP for delivery of top quality video from Antena 3, a major Spanish broadcaster. The advantages include the simplicity of equipment installation, options to upgrade the service and the possibility to work with lower available bandwidth by using Amino’s advanced codec technology.”

In addition to the AmiNET125 STBs, DICAS, based in Germany, supplied the encoders and the Spanish company Vidactive supplied its Multicast server tailored to hospitals, so that they could personalise software to configure web content and allow multimedia downloads.

The AmiNET125 recently won the prestigious CSI Product of the Year 2007 Award in the category “Best IPTV technology”, ahead of the Microsoft Xbox360 solution for IPTV. The CSI award was the third international accolade given to Amino’s multi-codec range of STBs in the last 2 years.