Fox Chooses Motorola for Transition to all HD Delivery

Motorola and Fox have announced that Motorola (News - Alert) has been selected to provide the satellite transmission equipment to Fox to transition all its satellite program distribution to high-definition (HD) delivery.

 

The satellite transmission equipment includes compression systems, multiplexors, and radios. This latest announcement is expected to enable Fox viewers to benefit from clear HD content on the company's broadcast network, national cable channels, regional sports networks, Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network.

 

Fox is moving from the current mix of SD and HD environments and multi-vendor technology platforms to a common all HD Motorola architecture. Fox believes that the transition to all-HD distribution will allow it to streamline its distribution infrastructure.

 

Since Motorola radios are expected to support the real time conversion of the HD content to the SD format, the need for parallel SD storage and distribution will be eliminated.

 

With this deployment the Fox programming services have taken a major step in the direction of producing and delivering TV content in HD form, said Andrew Setos, president of engineering for the Fox Group.

 

“The Motorola team immediately understood and embraced our vision and designed a system that not only met our needs but that will establish a new benchmark for quality and reliability,” he added.

 

Kevin Wirick, vice president of marketing for the IP Video Solutions business at Motorola, said that this ongoing collaboration between Motorola engineers and the Fox design team has resulted in an HD distribution project.

 

This project leverages all of the “significant advancements” that Motorola has made in HD compression, professional satellite radio development, and sophisticated network control.

 

As part of the migration, Fox is expected to provide its affiliates with Motorola’s DSR-6000 commercial digital satellite radio featuring the capability to derive an SD version of the HD content transmitted by Fox.

 

The Motorola radios are capable of reading the standardized Active Format Descriptor information carried with the HD content that specifies the appropriate image composition for 3x4 aspect ratio SD TV sets.

 

Using Motorola’s Broadcast Network Control System, Fox will manage these radios. Company officials said that this will give the company the ability to 'health check' both uplink and downlink paths.

 

Additionally, this will enable Fox to manage complex functions such as sports retunes, time zone selection, and restorals.

 

And, to distribute its programming through satellite, Fox will utilize Motorola's SE-3000 high quality HD encoders.

 

Officials said that their functionality includes statistical multiplexing, which enables Fox to combine individual HD streams into multiplexes operating with payloads as high as 73 Mb/s.

 

The DSR-6000 radio will convert the appropriate HD stream to the properly formatted SD signal and also passing the HD signal as ASI or IP.

 

The migration to Motorola technology is expected to be rolled out commencing Q109.