MUMBAI: Big TV, the newly launched direct-to-home (DTH) service from Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Group, has opted for Thomson headend system for deploying over 300 channels on its hybrid network.


Big TV plans to beam 300 high-definition and standard-definition channels, as well as 50 radio channels throughout India. The DTH service provider currently offers 202 channels.

"Launching such a large bouquet of channels, including HD channels, over a dual-distribution network is a challenging proposition which Big TV is qualified to meet. Viewer quality expectations are high and satellite bandwidth over India is limited," said Big TV CEO Arun Kumar Kapoor. "We selected Thomson's solutions as they offer best-in-class performance for picture quality and compression capacity."


"Our solutions have been specifically developed to reply to the pain points encountered by operators when choosing their systems for delivering video - notably quality of service, return on investment and network distribution optimisation for delivery of bandwidth heavy services such as HD," said Thomson senior EVP systems division Didier Trutt.
Thomson has supplied Big TV with video headend for hybrid networks, including its compression solutions featuring the Thomson ViBE multi-channel MPEG-4 SD encoders, ViBE Premium MPEG-4 encoders for HD video, XMS monitoring equipment, and NetProcessor repurposing and multiplexing solutions.

Thomson has also supported Big TV in creating a redundancy system on a larger scale, providing two separate uplinks which are 1,000 kilometers apart to protect viewing enjoyment being disrupted by exceptional weather factors such as monsoons.