Envivio, which provides MPEG-4 broadcast and streaming solutions, and Comtech EF Data, which supplies high-quality satellite communications products and systems, have announced a Digital Satellite News Gathering (DSNG) solution.

An official release informs that the solution based on Comtech EF Data's IP satellite modems with Turbo Product Coding (TPC) and Envivio's MPEG-4 platform will cut the cost of satellite transmissions by 50 per cent. The standards-based solution will be demonstrated for the first time at the NAB conference taking place in Las Vegas from 7-10 April.

The release states that the combination of Envivio's MPEG-4 video coding and Comtech EF Data's Turbo Forward Error Correction coding enables broadcasters to transmit at half the bandwidth of the MPEG-2/DVB-S systems they are currently using. This bandwidth saving leads directly to reduced space segment costs.

On the uplink side of the transmission chain, the Envivio LB-4100 real time, full-resolution MPEG-4 encoder interfaces directly to the Comtech EF Data CDM-IP 300L modulator via an IP interface. On the downlink side, the CDM-IP 300L demodulator receives the IP stream from the satellite and interfaces with one of Envivio's MPEG-4 decoders.

The system can be used for live encoding or offline encoding with store and forward to the receive site. The encoder can be set up to automatically save the session as an MPEG-4 file.