SIRIUS Satellite Radio selects Grass Valley Argus for Backseat TV

SIRIUS Satellite Radio has selected Grass Valley Argos MPEG-4 AVC mobile TV encoders from Thomson for deployment of its SIRIUS Backseat TV offering. The Argos MPEG-4 AVC encoder is designed to handle very low bit rates while enabling flexible frame rate encoding to meet the growing demand for audio and video content streamed over broadcast, broadband, and wireless networks. Argos relies on a powerful hardware platform that features statistical encoding, multiple codec support, multi-stream generation, advanced pre-processing filters, and superior configuration and supervision capabilities.

“We are pleased to assist SIRIUS in building out the next stage of their popular satellite delivered service offerings,” said Christophe Delahousse, Senior Vice President, Video Network Solutions for Grass Valley, a business within Thomson. “The Argos MPEG-4 mobility encoders continue to lead the industry and we’re confident that they will surpass the needs of SIRIUS, allowing the company to continue to develop new channels and mobile services that target consumers on the go.”

“We chose Grass Valley Argos encoders because of their superior design, video quality, redundancy scheme, and overall flexibility,” said Terry Smith, Senior Vice President of Engineering, SIRIUS Satellite Radio. “Our goal is to provide the highest quality service to our subscribers and using MPEG-4 AVC encoders will help us to continue to achieve that goal.”

With the Argos MPEG-4 AVC mobile TV encoder, horizontal resolution is supported up to CIF in 16-pixel increments—while reduced frame rates are also possible. Typical output is H.264 over IP/UDP/RTP. Typical video encoding bit rates range from 50 Kbps to 500 Kbps.

Grass Valley offers a number of products and systems that have helped strengthen its leadership position and unparalleled expertise in supporting broadcasters’ and content distributors’ need to produce and send digital video and other data types to large-screen high definition television sets as well as to small, portable or mobile devices. The digital mobility offering includes the Argos MPEG-4 AVC encoder and a variety of other products including, DVB-H IP encapsulators, ESG servers, Interactive Service Platform, transmission solutions, and much more needed to deliver content to mobile receivers efficiently