In Broadcast - April 2012 - 43

ISSUE 7 - APRIL 2012 | WWW.INBROADCAST.COM

InMEDIA
Satellite And Cable Inextricably Linked Cont.
LIVE, the satellite uplink and outside broadcast operator. SIS LIVE is involved in a type of DTH (direct to home) satellite work, supplying links to bookmakers’ shops on the broadcast network provided by its parent group Satellite Information Service (SIS), but the majority of its operations are aimed at contributions and newsgathering for broadcasters. Shadbolt says some of this is now done over ground-based ﬁbre connections - with venues like English Premier League football grounds fully cabled up for this, giving instant connectivity all year round – but there is still a great demand for satellite uplinks where there is no other suitable way of getting TV signals back to base. “As spot-beam coverage of the satellite, and newsgathering, with capability for 3D as well as HD. Eutelsat is said to have invested €350m in the building and launch of KA-SAT. While this sounds an immense amount of money, there are estimates that a sum like this can still be one seventh of how much a Ku satellite costs to build and get in the sky. SIS LIVE is looking at Ka band for contribs; Mark Shadbolt says that in addition to the greater capacity on the satellite, another advantage is the smaller ground terminals for both professional and domestic use. “There are some technical issues,” he adds, “such as ruggedness for some applications and signals passing through an Eutelsat matrix before being delivered. But in general Ka is giving satellite a new lease of life.” Technologies also get periodic boosts when the standards they are based on are updated. Right now the DVB (Digital Video Broadcasting) Project is facing calls to consider updating the DVB-S2 standard for digital satellite. This is the second-generation version of the original format for digital satellite broadcasting, which was published in 1993. Broadcasters and other satellite users naturally want the most powerful, efﬁcient systems possible but the call for a re-evaluation of DVB-S2 is being led primarily by manufacturers, including Newtec, Cisco and Thomson, along with operators like Arabsat and SES. Much of the impetus for this campaign has come from another manufacturer, NovelSat, which is promoting its NS3 transmission technology not only as a way for users to maximise satellite usage but also as the basis for an upgrade to DVB-S2. The NS3 range includes the NS1000 and NS2000

David Furstenberg, NovelSat Chairman

Connect AVB
Intercom goes Real-Time IP

Mark Shadbolt, SIS LIVE Sales Director

modem technology has improved so the broadcaster’ appetite for bandwidth has increased,” he comments. “What broadcasters were happy with ﬁve to ten years ago is now not good enough, especially with the coming of HD. These connections are very bandwidth hungry, even with the latest algorithms.” Ka band technology is going someway to solving this problem, offering greater capacity in a smaller package. Avanti Communications’ HYLAS, launched in 2010, was the ﬁrst Ka band satellite to go into operation. This was followed by Eutelsat’s KA-SAT, the ﬁrst High Throughput Satellite (HTS) in Europe. SES-Astra is now also moving towards offering Ka band services for its clients. KA-SAT gives a good example of how much more Ka band can offer over existing technologies; by employing a frequency re-use technique, the satellite can have a total capacity of over 70Gb/s, which is 38 times that of a standard Ku band telecoms bird. Eutelsat is promoting KA-SAT for both broadcasting (regional and local TV as well as corporate networks), which it says will beneﬁt from the

modulators and the NS3000 modem; it is aimed primarily at DTH but is also being assessed by the contributions uplinking market. In both cases NS3 technology has been shown to increase transponder performance, although, as Mark Shadbolt at SIS LIVE notes, there is a trade-off because more power is required and the signal to noise ratio increases. David Furstenberg, Chairman of the Board at NovelSat, observes that the constant demand for more broadcast satellite capacity is driven by two factors: people turning to TV as a luxury or comfort in a time of recession; and the technical challenge of ﬁtting new technology formats on the carriers. “Video consumption increases with the different standards,” he says. “For HD 720 requires ﬁve times more capacity than SD and 1080 needs ten times. When it comes to 3D that’s two channels of full HD, so it’s 20 times, and the jury is still out on how much Super High Deﬁnition will need. So the requirement for TV bandwidth is not going to subside, it is going to grow and grow.” NovelSat has produced a data rate of 765Mbps on a
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