Pacific Televsion Centre Boosts London Capabilities With New HD Gear

Pacific Television Centre (PacTV), a Los Angeles-based independent global transmission and production company, is following up the recent expansion of its bandwidth from OC3 (155mb) to OC48 (2480mb) between London and Los Angeles with key equipment upgrades to its London facility.
Central to these enhancements is a state-of-the-art Snell HD router that facilitates the increase in HD content delivery. In keeping with PacTV's mission of offering ciients maximum format flexibility, the 256x256 router is compatible with HD, SD, ASI and 3G.
Paul Abbott, Branch Manager of PacTV London, said: "This equipment expansion allows us to come full circle in regards to our ability to provide HD from end-to-end. With the new router, we are literally doubling our switching capabilities. Further, we have the full flexibility to offer our clients ASI, which is gaining popularity due to its ability to stay compressed from point-to-point. It all comes down to giving clients a choice of what works best for them."
PacTV London has also taken delivery of a Sony HDCAM, adding HDCAM to the multiple formats its master control room is capable of playing out and recording. For added convenience, it has enhanced its co-location spaces for clients and vendors.
Dave Miller, Technical Engineer, PacTV London, said: "We've seen a tremendous boost in HD requirements. By expanding to an OC48, we are now able to add JPEG2000 compression to our HD arsenal, providing visually lossless compression, ultimately affording us seven times the capacity as we had last year. The addition of the router, with its ability to work in multiple formats, is an excellent compliment to the enhanced capacities."
With the equipment and capacity upgrades, PacTV London can now offer clients up to seven simultaneous HD feeds, an increase from the three that it supported previously. It is currently utilising some of these new resources for the current season of English Premier League football. Furthermore, it can accommodate HD transmission around the globe including New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland and Paris.
PacTV announced the expansion of its bandwidth between London and Los Angeles from OC3 to OC48 earlier this year, and followed up this milestone by increasing its capacities between Los Angeles and Sydney to an OC48 and between Sydney and Auckland to an OC12, effectively completing the loop on its worldwide primary fiber network. In addition, it just recently added four 1.5 gig uncompressed HD lines to BT Tower London, bringing the total local loops in London to sixteen.
(KMcA/GK)