Waterman Broadcasting selects Telairity BE8500 encoders for HD field services

SANTA CLARA, USA: Telairity, a global leader in encoding technology, announced that Florida-based Waterman Broadcasting of Florida has equipped its fleet of ENG and satellite vehicle with Telairity's industry-leading H.264/AVC HD/SD encoders.

Waterman Broadcasting operates two TV stations on Florida's west coast, WBBH-TV, "NBC 2" in Ft. Myers, and WZVN-TV, "ABC 7," licensed to Naples.

To service joint news operations at these stations, the company purchased six BE8500 dual-mode auto-switching encoders and four BE-IRD-5502 satellite receiver/decoders.
A third Waterman station, WVIR-TV in Charlottesville, Va., is currently evaluating the purchase of additional BE8500 and BE-IRD-5502 units. The Waterman stations join other stations around the country, representing a wide variety of ownership groups, that have previously selected Telairity encoders for DENG (digital electronic news gathering).

According to Dan E. Billings, director of technical services for Waterman Broadcasting, the company selected Telairity encoders following a head-to-head comparison of "every H.264 encoder at NAB [2011]." At this year's annual National Association of Broadcaster show in Las Vegas, he noted, the company was focused on upgrading its ENG field delivery to HD. "MPEG-2 simply takes too much bandwidth to operate well in the newly reduced 2GHz MW spectrum so I knew we should encode to much more efficient H.264."

Billings praised the Telairity encoders for their low latency, 4:2:2 capability, auto SD/HD switching, simple presets and flexible setup. "The unique software driven architecture and solid build quality were also key points leading to our decision," he added. "In the future, we plan to take advantage of the Telairity encoder's IP output for use with cellular 4G."

Telairity's BE8500 versatile video encoder can autosense either HD or SD video formats, and will automatically select a corresponding encoding mode. It combines leading-edge compression technology (either H.264/AVC or AVS) with settable encode latencies ranging from 150ms to 2 seconds.

The BE-IRD-5502 is a versatile broadcast-class H.264/AVC (MPEG-4) HD/SD integrated receiver and decoder for broadcasters, cable operators, and telecoms.