Amino/dicas support innovative IPTV over satellite hospital feed

December 18, 2007 - Content from Spanish broadcaster Antena 3 is being delivered to hospitals in Spain over an IP satellite data link, in an interesting use of IPTV technology.

It is thought to be the first such delivery of a live national TV channel in the country and is being supported by set-top boxes from Amino Communications and encoding by dicas, the German MPEG-4 specialist. La Fundación Antena 3, a non-profit charity supported by Grupo Antena 3, is broadcasting a new free-to-view channel called FAN3 in hospitals. This offers information specifically related to children’s illnesses and treatments. Furthermore, FAN3 educates children and teenagers by fostering good habits to protect their health in an educational and enjoyable manner. FAN3 is broadcast from Monday to Friday and its programmes also include conventional content such as TV movies, series and cartoons.
La Fundación Antena 3 enables hospitals to receive the programmes from FAN3 via the Hispasat satellite. The channel is received over a 2Mbps one-way satellite link before being decoded using an Amino AmiNET125 IPTV set-top box. The feed is then modulated to an available channel number and distributed to all TVs in the hospital.

Juan Carlos Sanchez-Rico Jiménez, Technical Maintenance Director, Antena 3, explains, “This is the first operative IP video distribution over a satellite link in Spain and the benefit for La Fundación is being able to use IP for delivery of top quality video from Antena 3, a major Spanish broadcaster. The advantages include the simplicity of equipment installation, options to upgrade the service and the possibility to work with lower available bandwidth by using Amino’s advanced codec technology.”

dicas supplied the encoders used for this deployment. The German codec specialist and Amino are already familiar with each other of course: at IBC this year they were demonstrating their SD and HD MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 products interoperating (including the second generation AmiNET125 set-top decoding video streams from the dicas 2010 MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 standard-definition encoder.