Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) has picked Tandberg Television’s gear for its digital terrestrial television network.

SBS, a multicultural and multilingual public broadcaster, selected Tandberg’s iSIS 800 headend architecture. Tandberg, which is part of the Ericsson Group, is supplying high-definition (HD) and HDTV encoders, and dense multiplexing and embedded single frequency network (SFN) adaptation, all of which is based on a core of flexible IP switching.

SBS’s digital television services began in 2001 and currently reach an estimated 96 percent of the Australian population. The new centralized headend will generate DVB-T transport streams for 12 separate regions.

This is the first deployment of Tandberg’s iSIS 8000 IP headend architecture for the Australian DTT market, and it is the first deployment worldwide of dense SFN adaptation as part of the Tandberg MX8400 IP multiplexer.

“SBS Television is watched by more than seven million Australians every week, and an increasing number of them choose to view in digital,” said Paul Broderick, director of technology and distribution at SBS. “We are committed to expanding digital broadcasting to our diverse audience, and we are upgrading our DTT network to take advantage of the latest generation headend technology.”

With the SBS deal, Tandberg’s compression headends are now used in four of Australia’s five national digital terrestrial networks.

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