Exterity was selected to equip Spiegel’s new production facility in Hamburg with their market leading IP-based TV and video distribution technology. Installed by German specialist Perfect Media Solutions, the IPTV solution supplies a combination of 47 SD and HD TV channels simultaneously to 600 members of staff throughout the new facility. All of this was achieve by PMS in less than 1 week.

The channels distributed are a mixture of live broadcast TV captured using an Exterity DVB-S2 TVgateway (taking channels from Astra and Hotbird) and in-house TV channels using HD-SDI encoders from the SpiegleTV playout/post-production centres and via WAN from outside broadcast studios. All the channels can be view at staff computers using AvediaPlayer Desktop or on screens attached to the 160 AvediaPlayer receivers situated throughout the building.

Spiegel chose Exterity’s solution because of their flexible approach to IPTV, utilising industry standard technologies to ensure interoperability between Spiegel’s key systems. This included integration with Active Directory for username/password controlled access to video playback and TV channels. Additional factors of choosing an Exterity IPTV system included the ability to play back video on both PCs and Macs, superior reliability and the quality offered by a digital solution over such a large site and number of users.