Satellite service expands into IP delivery

By Robin Berger

The world’s largest provider of satellite transmission services, France Telecom’s GlobeCast subsidiary, debuted its new media center in Los Angeles in March with a definite plan in mind.

“Five years ago, teleport operations were driven by a lot for occasional services,” said David Sprechman, president & CEO of GlobeCast America. “Today, business is focused on full-time channel distribution services that we deliver over managed platforms.”

The company delivers 85 full-time television and radio channels direct-to-home, mostly from its Los Angeles gateway, plus streams sent via cable platforms, thanks to its global ATM fiber ring. GlobeCast views Los Angeles as a strategic location for increased program origination (seven channels now originate from that city), as business continues to pick up from the industry slump.

EXTREME MAKEOVER

To this end, the company’s old L.A.-based 15-by-25-foot network operations hub gave way to a new 6,000-square-foot, two-story media center.

“We built this all ourselves; we didn’t bring in an integrator,” said GlobeCast senior vice president of engineering, Charles Trice. Most challenging, he said, was the router wiring.

According to his calculations, there’s close to 18 tons of cable on the floor and in the walls, and more than 78 miles of video cable.

The huge expansion and upgrade was about four years in the making, from planning in 2000 to its recent completion. Clients appreciate the effort.

“It’s a much more advanced system digitally—it handles many more formats quickly, there are more ports, there’s more switching,” said Dick Tauber, vice president of transmission systems and new technology for the CNN News Group. He also noted the increased monitoring capabilities.

CNN currently contracts the L.A. media center’s uplinks to PanAmSat’s PAS 8 satellite across the Pacific, as well as GlobeCast’s terrestrial fiber connections to the cable network’s Atlanta hub for a half dozen channels.

“Whether we like it or not, we keep adding new channels,” Tauber said. And, he added, there’s the “backhaul stuff” that is done through the Los Angeles facility.

“One of the advantages is that we not only distribute our programming from one location and one antenna, if we have any news requirements for getting stuff back to Atlanta, we will more than likely try to do it on the same satellite,” he said.

TECH OPS

The Technical Operations Center houses a wide array of standard equipment (see sidebar), but the center’s SkyStream Mediaplex 20 data router seems to merit special esteem. In fact, Trice said, the company’s goal is to make this piece of equipment the focal point in each teleport (the company also has major teleports in New York and Miami, plus uplink facilities in Washington, D.C., and Sylmar, Calif.)

“It’s got the utmost flexibility in routing data and building transport streams for transmission,” Trice said. He noted that its transmission rate multiplexer feature could bring in 4.5 megabits of data and reduce it to a 2.5-megabit output, allowing GlobeCast to combine more channels into its available bandwidth.

The company also expects the Mediaplex 20’s ability to provide an acceptable signal at a low bit-rate to help pave the way for a new business—providing Internet Protocol applications for its clients, according to Sprechman.

Sprechman said GlobeCast has already installed a 1,000-site IP SOHO satellite network for a leading multinational corporation, and is currently testing two-way satellite delivery. He readily elaborated on the benefits to broadcasters in contribution and backhaul feeds from the field to the studio, using a file transfer service over satellite.

At least one client is convinced.

“One of the things that we’re beginning to look at now is to add some communications and data to the backhaul requirements, which then gets us to two-way computer connections for doing internal e-mail and [getting] access to our internal databases,” CNN’s Tauber said. “Now, with IP, you can really get a lot of bang for your buck—both for video and data.”

GlobeCast is also implementing IP platforms to delivery digital cinema and hotel in-room entertainment networks.