Al Jazeera Media Network is using Teracue IPTV solutions to distribute TV channels at its new UK studio in ‘the Shard’, London. This marks the fifth installation at the Al Jazeera Media Network using the IPTV solutions provided by Teracue.
For signal ingest of more than 60 TV and radio channels DVB-to-IP Gateways from the DMM-Series are used. The DMM-Series receive DVB signals coming via satellite, cable or terrestrial and convert them to IP streams. Using the common interface, it is also possible to decrypt encrypted signals. SDI feeds coming from the studios are encoded directly at the CAR using Teracues HD Encoder, the ENC-300-HDSDI and distributed to the IPTV network.
Decoding of the IPTV streams is done using Amino IPTV set-top-boxes with special Teracue software installed making it possible to monitor and control all STBs from a central management system. The heart of monitoring and remote control of the STBs is the Element Manager software, which can be controlled separately or combined in groups using single commands or pre-sets.
In addition to the IPTV STBs, the StreamView series of multi viewers are used to provide a mosaic view to screens. StreamView is able to decode several streams simultaneously and display these streams in different layouts. It is possible to switch dedicated streams to full screen and select audio to be routed to the speaker or mute it.
To provide IPTV functionality to the employees as well, XPlayer software is used, which is specially designed for streaming application and can be used as standalone player or embedded to websites as an ActiveX element.