Modulus brings MPEG-4 to production truck market

Remote production professionals and sports broadcasters looking to take advantage of MPEG-4 AVC h.264 to save transmission bandwidth have a new option courtesy of Modulus Video s ME2000 MPEG-4 AVC encoding platform.

Bob Wilson, Modulus Video chairman and CEO says the one-rack unit is ideal for installation within mobile production vehicles because of its low weight and low power consumption.

This is perfect for the sports professional because it s only 20-inches deep, one rack-unit tall and consumes less than 200 watts of power, he says. Plus it does both SD and HD in one box and can fit lower budget requirements.

Wilson expects the MPEG-4 unit to sit alongside MPEG-2 encoders for the near term (and replace MPEG-2 gear long term) and enable transmission from the truck of HD signals in less than 6 Mbps of bandwidth.

For the forward-thinking broadcaster this can let them get a different price point on transmission costs without sacrificing SD or HD image quality, he says. It also has a delay that is less than half a second.

Wilson acknowledges that for those broadcasters wanting better than ATSC quality signals MPEG-4 is still not there. But for the college sports or high-school sports market it s a natural fit that can open up new distribution methods.

If the NFL wanted to make all of their games available over a telco VOD system in realtime they could use this system to create an MPEG-4 file of the game as it happens in either SD or HD, he says.
And with MPEG4 decoders in every iPod, Sony PSP, and telco set-top box getting the content in front of consumers isn t a problem. A couple of years ago we were a little too early with this technology, says Wilson. But what we re doing is building a faster, better, cheaper MPEG-4 encoder that can help pass SD-quality video over a T1 line.

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