Spain's new satellite-delivered pay service, Starmax HD, has chosen France Telecom's GlobeCast to provide aggregation, encryption and transmission services.
Starmax HD is hoping to shake up the pay TV market in Spain by offering more affordable prices, not requiring subscribers to sign contacts and delivering more HD content. "Even though more than half of Spanish households have HD-compatible technology, most Spanish consumers are not enjoying HD content to the fullest extent," said Maciej Sojka, Starmax HD managing director in a statement. "As a groundbreaking platform, Starmax HD will change the way we watch television."
For the new platform, GlobeCast is providing fiber contribution from several countries; reception of SD and HD channels at the company's Sainte Assise Teleport in France; signal compression in MPEG-4 with multiplexing, uplink, and satellite capacity; and encryption for Conax.
In addition to GlobeCast's content management and transmission services, the Starmax platform uses set-top boxes from Ferguson, and viewer access cards from Conax. Starmax viewers will have the ability to record programs and play content files from external hard drives, as well as Internet access to streaming content through the set-top box.
