Broadcast Australia pioneers digital service for community channel TVS

[khurramdar]

Broadcast Australia pioneers digital service for community channel TVS

Wednesday, 10 March 2010 11:07

Leading broadcast transmission services provider, Broadcast Australia, has assisted Television Sydney (TVS) to become the first community television service in Australia to broadcast in digital.

Delivering the fully managed TVS transmission service from its Gore Hill site, Broadcast Australia is now providing coverage of the new digital program to the metropolitan Sydney area. The TVS transmission can be found on digital channel 44.

According to Broadcast Australia Engineering Systems Consultant, Doug Iles, this project is not only the first community digital service in Australia, but also the first time Broadcast Australia is hosting multiplexing on a fully commercial basis. “Typically, we take pre-multiplexed content from the content providers for transmission,” he said. “In this instance, however, Broadcast Australia is delivering a fully managed service that involves the end-to-end encoding, multiplexing, transmitting and combining of the content feed provided by TVS.”

One additional service Broadcast Australia is currently multiplexing with the TV signal is an electronic program guide (EPG). To meet the challenging project timelines, the company has initially employed an innovative solution using a web-hosted EPG system, which enables the EPG service to be implemented extremely quickly. The multiplex itself is also capable of accommodating additional services in the future when the longer term use of this spectrum is decided. Additionally, the solution implemented by Broadcast Australia has been designed to include the Freeview EPG when this becomes available later in 2010.

Broadcast Australia is also providing a digital monitoring service to measure the integrity of the TVS broadcast signal. This comprehensive monitoring solution includes supervision of the program feed, encoders, multiplexers and transmitters. “If the video stops, or the audio is lost, for example, the digital monitoring solution will assist us in highlighting the problem and identifying the cause,” said Iles. “Monitoring alarms alert the Broadcast Australia 24/7 network operations centre (NOC), allowing support staff there to respond rapidly to any anomalies that may occur.”

With the TVS digital broadcast successfully launched in Sydney, Broadcast Australia is looking ahead to its next digital community broadcast projectsâ€"in Brisbane and Adelaide. “We will be able to use the understanding gained through the launch of this service to streamline future implementations,” said Iles. “Gore Hill will provide an invaluable template for this. We have engineered a robust and reliable service for Sydney, and intend to use this experience to provide a comparable operation and level of support in Brisbane and Adelaide, and for potential future community digital broadcast services.”

Broadcast Australia manages one of the largest geographical digital television broadcast networks in the world, with a geographical area covering almost 77 million square kilometres. Since 2001, when the company began rolling out the digital network, it has progressively provided digital television coverage in stages to metropolitan centres, regional centres, translator sites, and rural Australia.

Broadcast Australia advises that some Sydney viewers may need to rescan their digital-ready TV or set-top box in order to receive the TVS service.