FIS World Ski Championships: new media gateways for ARD and ZDF

German public broadcasters ARD and ZDF used Nevion’s new NX4600 media gateways to transport their HD live contribution feeds from last month’s FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in Beaver Creek (USA) to Germany. This is the first of many live sports events for which ARD and ZDF intend to use the NX4600 gateways.

ARD and ZDF selected Nevion’s NX4600 after extensive testing. Besides an intuitive user interface with built-in monitoring, one of the most important technical factors in their decision was the picture quality relative to the bandwidth usage, which ensures an optimum quality of experience for viewers. Other important technical considerations were high density, flexibility and built-in network aggregation, keeping network costs down for ARD and ZDF. The NX4600 supports up to four H.264/AVC or MPEG-2 codec modules, each of which can be used either as an encoder or a decoder.

The technical benefits were complemented by the relationship ARD and ZDF have built with Nevion’s German partner LogicMedia over nearly two decades. “The NX4600 was introduced to the market at IBC 2014 and has already shown an enormous uptake in the very competitive H.264 codec market,” said Thomas Heinzer, head of strategic projects at Nevion. “We are obviously delighted that ARD and ZDF chose this product for such a high-profile sports event, as it represents a real endorsement of the quality of our solution. It’s also a testament to the outstanding support that our partner LogicMedia provides to its customers.”