Germany’s Media Broadcast selects Nevion for IP transport

Nevion has provided a range of its products to Media Broadast, Germany’s largest service provider for the broadcast and media industry, for its new broadcast distribution network, ARD-Disnet. This is designed to handle DVB-T, DVB-T2 HD, FM, DAB+ as well as generic data transport.

Media Broadcast was commissioned by German public broadcasters Hessischer Rundfunk (hr), Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (mdr), Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR), Radio Bremen (rb), Südwestrundfunk (SWR) and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) to build and run this new distribution network. One of the major drivers for this new network was the need to handle the increased bandwidth and availability requirements that resulted from the conversion of signals to DVB-T2 HD.

Media Broadcast turned to Nevion and its partner, LOGIC media solutions, to provide the equipment to transport the signals reliably over IP to over 200 DVB-T2 HD transmitters.

The Nevion products delivered for this project include: TVG425 transport stream gateway for ASI to IP conversion; VS906 modular digital contribution codec for transport of E1 data over IP; TNS544 TSoIP switch for seamless IP switching; and TNS4200 media monitoring probe for DVB-T2 HD monitoring

The project went live at the end of 2016, less than a year after Nevion received the order from Media Broadcast. After an initial parallel run with the old network, a full switch-over took place overnight on 1 January 2017.

“With the help of LOGIC media solutions’ expertise and Nevion’s solutions, we have been able to implement a high performance, scalable and highly available broadcast infrastructure that covers all the digital services of the commissioning group, and is also able to accommodate future broadcasting requirements for years to come,” says Frank Schulz, CTO, Media Broadcast.

This new distribution network allows studios and broadcasters to benefit from up to 100 times more bandwidth capacity than the previous network allowed. The network and adaptation technology were also designed with redundancy in mind, ensuring a guaranteed network availability rate of 99.9%.

Jens Gnad, CEO, Logic Media Solutions, says: “When looking at Media Broadcast’s previous distribution network and their requirements for the new solution, it made total sense to use Nevion’s range of products to deliver the best possible performance. Thanks to a great collaboration between Media Broadcast, Nevion and Logic Media Solutions, this challenging, large-scale project was delivered on time, and the switch-over and subsequent operation has gone smoothly.”