Televisa Deploys High Quality MPEG-4 Systems from Envivio for Digital Satellite News Gathering

FIFA World Cup and Mexican Presidential Election Broadcast via 4Caster ™ B3 Encoders

Televisa is the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world and is a major player in the international entertainment business.  Its three national television networks, Channels 2, 5 and 9, are comprised of 225 stations nationwide, and reach 99% of Mexico’s television households with 74% of the television audience share.

“We selected the Envivio systems after testing and comparing them with other systems on the market.  The picture quality of the Envivio systems far surpassed its competition,” said William Aguirre, Director of Satellite Operations for Televisa.  “Using the Envivio systems to lower the bit rates for each transmission stream, we can double the number of simultaneous transmissions over the same satellite bandwidth.”

Maintaining picture quality while lowering bit rates were key goals for Televisa when selecting MPEG-4 systems for news contribution feeds.  With the Envivio systems, Televisa is now encoding at 2 Mbps, providing considerable bandwidth savings over their previous MPEG-2 solution which was operating at 5 Mbps.  At present, Televisa has deployed 40 of the Envivio® Broadcast Series standard definition (SD) 4Caster™ B3 encoders and 10 4View™ D1 professional decoders.

The 4Caster B3 is a fourth generation real time encoder and delivers the most complete implementation of MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 compression techniques available.  Ideal for standard definition broadcast contribution, distribution and IPTV applications, the B3 encoder delivers the industry’s highest quality, full resolution video at less than 2 Mbps.  The system’s hardware platform combined with superior encoding algorithms offers broadcasters and IPTV service providers greater processing power for advanced compression capabilities and noise reduction for bandwidth constrained applications.

Envivio 4View D1 is a professional SD MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 Main Profile decoder.  The system also supports AVC Baseline Profile as well as ASP and SP video decoding, and MPEG-4 AAC/HE-AAC audio decoding.  4View D1 is a key component of Envivio media transport solutions and is a companion product to the 4Caster series of SD encoders.  The professional decoder may also be deployed with any open standards-based SD MPEG-4 encoding system.  Combined with the Envivio encoders, 4View D1 provides low latency and high network resilience and offers superior video quality at less than half the bandwidth required by MPEG-2.

About Televisa

Grupo Televisa, S.A., is the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world and a major participant in the international entertainment business.  It has interests in television production and broadcasting, production of pay television networks, international distribution of television programming, direct-to-home satellite services, publishing and publishing distribution, cable television, radio production and broadcasting, professional sports and live entertainment, feature film production and distribution, and the operation of a horizontal Internet portal.  Grupo Televisa also owns an unconsolidated equity stake in Univision, the leading Spanish-language media company in the United States, and in La Sexta, a free-to-air television venture in Spain. 

About Envivio Inc.