Motorola Helps Put The Squeeze on MTV

BY ANTHONY CRUPI When pop tarts such as Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera want to squeeze into a garment that’s about five times too small to accommodate them without contravening the laws of physics and/or violating any number of public indecency ordinances, they call on a stylist. When the network that breathlessly covers this sort of thing wants to squeeze more programming into its broadcast stream, it calls on Motorola. Last week, Motorola’s broadband communications division announced that MTV Networks will use its DigiCipher II video compression encoders to improve the distribution of digital programming services. As part of a proposed three-year phased program, MTV will deploy Motorola’s encoders, access control and commercial IRDs (integrated receiver/decoders) to help speed the digital conversion of Nickelodeon West, CMT East, TNN East, MTV West and TNN West. In so doing, MTV will be able to free up a significant chunk of bandwidth in its digital transmission paths, said Marty Stein, Motorola Broadband’s senior marketing manager. “With analog transmission, a single program can take up to a full 36-MHz C-band transponder,” Stein said. “With digital, that same asset can be used for ten or 12 programs. That opens up a lot of extra space for segmented and niche programming.” The five digitized network feeds will be transmitted from Viacom’s network operations center in New York. MTV will employ four DigiCipher II encoders configured with a total of 25 channels. Motorola’s compression tech is engineered to handle full-bandwidth video and audio inputs, Stein said. Another integrated feature, the PurePixel processing package, will be used to improve the efficiency of transmission by removing background noise from the programming stream. It’s not the first time Motorola has helped MTV step up its digital conversion plans, said Michael Aloisi, VP of engineering for MTVN. “We’ve already experienced a successful digital launch of the Suite [MTV’s digital package] with DigiCipher II.” HBO and ESPN have also deployed DigiCipher II service.