TANDBERG Television announced that it has delivered a complete IPTV video head-end to global communications company Atlas Interactive, a part of the Atlas Group, for a large scale multimedia broadband deployment over the Indian telephone network. TANDBERG Television has provided a range of solutions to enable the delivery of broadcast quality television and video on-demand services over IP. The Atlas netTV project will launch services to an initial 50,000 subscribers in the National Capital Region of Delhi in 2005.

"This is a milestone project in the development of India's consumer entertainment and information infrastructure and we are delighted to have been selected as a partner by Atlas. This contract is not only confirmation of our IPTV expertise and technology leadership but also furthers our strength in the Indian TV market where we have been serving broadcasters and operators for many years," says Noel Matthews, Director of Broadband for TANDBERG Television.

Atlas' netTV project is a significant move to introduce a broadband entertainment system across India. The network has been built to be flexible, robust and scaleable and is able to deliver a wide range of services including video on-demand, broadcast TV, music, video conferencing, SMS, email web, intranet access and data at high-speed broadband access speeds.

"To deliver a broadcast quality TV and video experience to our customers we need to deploy best of breed MPEG-2 decoding and encoding, integrated with bandwidth efficient IP streaming. The choice of TANDBERG Television, with its video and TV expertise and high performance solutions, gives us a highly flexible and robust video platform that will help to maximise our investment in this new business venture," says Abhishek Verma, Chairman, Atlas Interactive.

TANDBERG Television has been developing solutions for the IPTV market for over five years and has harnessed its extensive TV delivery experience, based on building many of the world's largest Pay-TV systems. The company's solutions include products that have been designed specifically for the television over IP market and that have already been deployed by over thirty five telco and fibre operators around the world.

A range of TANDBERG Television solutions are being deployed in the Atlas network, including TT1260 professional receivers that feed the video streams to the award-winning TANDBERG IP Streamer. Each IP Streamer in the system includes TANDBERG Television encoders to allow for bit-rate reduction of the streams to meet the low bandwidth capacity of the ADSL network. All parts of the system have full redundancy and are controlled by the nCompass management system, with monitoring based on the TANDBERG TT1260 with integrated IP input and the TANDBERG TT4010 transport stream analyser.

The video head-end is being installed and integrated by TANDBERG Television's long-standing Indian business partner, Horizon Broadcast Electronics Pvt. Ltd. "We are delighted to be playing a part in this important IPTV roll-out and are looking forward to working closely with Atlas to enable it to deliver high quality television through India. The combination of our local knowledge and TANDBERG Television's strong IPTV track-record is a solid platform on which operators such as Atlas can build profitable business models and help generate new revenue streams," says Kuldeep Kaul, Director, Horizon Broadcast Electronics Pvt Ltd.