Starz Entertainment has selected advanced compression gear from Motorola to support the launch of new high-definition services Starz Comedy, Starz Edge and Starz Kids & Family.
Starz is buying a Motorola four-channel, high-definition (HD) MPEG-2 encoding system that will compress, encrypt, and modulate the HD signals within a single integrated transmission system. The new HD system is designed to support Starz’s planned future migration to MPEG-4 compression technology, and will use MPEG-4 AVC technology originally developed by Modulus Video, which Motorola acquired in May and integrated into its Home & Network Mobility Group. Competing premium programmer HBO has already committed to the Motorola MPEG-4 technology for making all 26 of its channels available in HD by mid-2008.
A key piece of Starz's new content delivery chain is Motorola’s new DSR4410MD multi-program demodulator/decryptor, which receives DVB-S2 modulated signals and can decrypt up to 64 services from a single MPEG-2 transport stream. Testing with STARZ signals has shown reliable transmission at 77.5 Mbps using a 36 MHz, C-Band satellite transponder – which translates into four-to-five MPEG-2 HD streams or as many as 10 MPEG-4/AVC HD streams per transponder.
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"We were very pleased with the quality and efficiency offered by Motorola’s new modular uplink system," said Ray Milius, senior vice president, programming operations for Starz Entertainment, in a statement. "Both the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 HD encoders interfaced seamlessly with the access control and transmission system in use today, so adding current and future HD services is very straightforward.”
