NAB: Nevion targets merging worlds of broadcasters, telcos

Nevion, formed last year from a merger between Asia-focused Network Electronics and United States-centric VPG, is using the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show this week to outline its media transport strategy for broadcasters and telecom service providers. In addition to an expanded global focus, the newly formed company comes at a time when the broadcast and telecom markets are coming together as video is proliferating across all screens.

IPTV used to be a small or non-existent part of most companies video transporting businesses, but that has changed as the TV service has become more popular and landline revenues have slowed, according to Eugene Keane, president of Nevion USA. Now, it is central to how most telcos do business. Although it got its start in the broadcast industry, the Norway-based company is targeting telcos to meet this growing need. Nevion was responsible for the video transport for such high-profile events as President Barack Obama’s inauguration, launches from Kennedy Space Center, the Super Bowl, Olympics and the Academy Awards.

"We offer a full understanding of video from the broadcaster down to the prosumer and carrier," said John Glass, executive vice president of marketing.

Nevion’s focus is on the contribution, not distribution side, according to Nevion CEO Dr. Oddbjorn Bergem. The company provides the boxes and software to build media networks that transport video, audio and data file. It can provide a telco with a single box up to a complete network for transport. The company concentrates on the point leading up to the headend for quality, managing anything needed to bring video from the camera to the set-top box, added Keane.

"The last mile is the carrier’s responsibility, but it has to be delivered and processed at the highest possible quality level than ever before," Keane said. "It has to have very high quality going into the headend. Never before has a company tried to match bit rates with appropriate level of processing."

Bergem said that Nevion hasn’t yet spent a lot of money to market itself, but its long telco customer list already includes Verizon, AT&T, Qwest, Cincinnati Bell, BT, Telstra and several others. Its competitor set in the telecom space is limited today, but companies like Harris, T-VIPs, Cisco and NetInsight are also getting involved with transporting video.

At NAB, Nevion is also showing off additions and enhancements to its three main product lines, all based on industry standards, to provide the routing and transport systems for a wide range of video network interfaces and signal formats.

Nevion’s Ventura series uses JPEG 2000 compression over IP, Sonet and legacy fiber networks to reduce bandwidth without sacrificing quality. Flashlink is a low-power platform used to deliver high optical performance over 3G-SDK fiber, and VikinX uses low-cost Sublime compact routers. To support these three product lines, Nevion is also introducing DataMiner this week, which will monitor the video transport chain to control network assets. It can scale down for small systems or come in a multi-vendor platform for larger scale systems.