Airtel digital TV employs MPEG-4 over DVB-S2 to offer high audio and video quality in an HD-ready system, with a universal remote for the STB and television and a significantly larger antenna offering superior rain-fade performance. The service will initially be marketed through 21,000 retail outlets in 62 cities and includes interactive applications for booking cinema tickets and travel packages, online shopping, news and games. The DTH program acquisition and uplink center that Globecomm designed, engineered, and integrated starting in March of 2007 provides Bharti with a future-proof path to all forms of media distribution. Featuring two, 11.3m Ku-band antennas, Globecomm’s AxxSys Orion monitor & control system, and fifteen 4.5m receive-only antennas for program acquisition, the Airtel digital TV Center is based on a Globecomm Media Processing Center (MPC) architecture for converting video into a wide variety of formats for distribution to cable TV, DTH satellite or handheld, and Internet video at many different bit rates and formats for live or file-based applications.
