GlobeCast Australia’s Sydney broadcast operations center has announced it will now provide new services for clients that are uplinking and downlinking HD program content.

 

The new services, which came about with an installation from Newtec (News - Alert) and its technology partner Lumina Broadcast Systems Australia, is part of a massive upgrade of the GlobeCast Australia master control and teleport, to cope with current and forecast demand. To meet this demand, Newtec and Lumina worked with GlobeCast Australia to design and deliver a flexible and cost effective uplink system.

 

According to GlobeCast Australia, the master control itself will double in size in 2009. GlobeCast Australia is the provider of choice to deliver ad hoc content to and from broadcasters throughout Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.

 

GlobeCast Australia said it chose Newtec’s Broadcast Modulators (AZ110) and combiners with integrated Upconverter (AZ750) to create a facility that offers full flexibility for any scenario that could potentially be requested by clients.

 

GlobeCast Australia caters to Asia via fulltime leased and operated 9MHz C-band SCPC on AsiaSat 2 for occasional use for distribution throughout Asia on the preferred Asian distribution satellite.

 

Recently, Newtec and Lumina Broadcast Systems delivered a system for AsiaSat 2 that is capable of single, dual, triple or quad carrier operation and can be individually driven from a purpose built graphical interface in GlobeCast Australia’s master control. Any combination of these carriers or their committed sum bandwidth on satellite can be manipulated at the touch of an onscreen button to engage single or dual carrier operation for up to 36MHz of HD broadcasting.

 

Newtec said its Azimuth Broadcast modulator (AZ110) running in DVB-S2 -- 8PSK – will assist the commitment toward HD delivery with maximized video bit rates on the new AS-5 satellite, due to launch later in 2009.

 

“The result for us is the interference free combining of multiple carriers, low losses and minimal spectral regrowth, all of which are major implications when combining signals of varied amplitudes for diverse transponder loading on the same satellite,” said GlobeCast Australia director of engineering, Peter Booth, calling the Newtec Broadcast Modulator AZ110 for all five of its channels a critical component of its ASI turnarounds from satellite.

 

“This enables us to add BISS encryption to an incoming signal without de-encoding and re-encoding, saving vital seconds on the broadcast, reducing equipment count as well as maintaining high quality,” Booth said. “Running at up to 45Mbaud in DVB-S2, it’s capable of doing what we ask of it, both for SD and HD broadcasting. By carefully choosing the equipment and designing our system with constant re-evaluation, we have created a high end system with a significant cost reduction over alternative options.”