TMCnews Featured Article
October 20, 2009
Ekinops Selected to Build Uncompressed HD Video Network by Modern VideoFilm
By Raja Singh Chaudhary, TMCnet Contributor
Ekinops (News - Alert), a provider of advanced optical transport equipment for service providers and enterprise customers, has been selected by Modern VideoFilm, a Cali.-based post-production company in the entertainment industry, to build an optical network for transporting uncompressed HD video. The company will transport its video and data during the post-production process for movies and TV shows through the Ekinops network.
Modern VideoFilm has been offering its services to the major Hollywood studios engaged in movie and TV production business. Its facilities at various locations in the Los Angeles have been networked together so teams can access data between sites.
For transporting 10 GbE data along with the SDI and HD-SDI video over fiber, the company uses the Ekinops equipment. Ekinops offers a 360 platform that integrates multiple video and data circuits into one streamlined system, simplifying the architecture and reducing costs. Apart from it, data and video traffic can be carried through the platform over long distances even on poor fiber with minimum or no in-line amplifiers, which cuts down the implementation costs for the post-production studios considerably.
The Ekinops 360 is an advanced optical transport solution for metro, regional and long-haul networks. The company has deployed its Transport on a Chip, or “T-Chip,” technology into the platform, wherein it integrates transport intelligence a highly compact and efficient design, reducing costs, footprint, and ongoing power consumption and manufacturing delivery times to customers.
The studios can alternatively compress the serial digital interface, or “SDI,” and high definition serial digital interface, or “HD-SDI,” signals for transporting them in a fast manner even at lower bandwidth networks; the quality of compressed video is much lower and not suited for the studios. Also, more and more content providers and production companies nowadays are looking for transport of uncompressed digital video signals, doing away with the need for compression and avoiding the loss in the original quality of the video signal.
According to Kim Roberts, Director of Corporate Services at Modern VideoFilm, the need to transport HD video between company’s different facilities has increased rapidly since the emergence of high-definition technology. Roberts said that there really wasn’t a comprehensive HD infrastructure that would fit Modern VideoFilm’s needs in place yet, so the company decided to lease dark fiber between its sites and purchase the Ekinops equipment to light it up.
The video equipment used by Modern VideoFilm is very expensive and the new optical network lets it share the equipment among its different sites. Otherwise, the company would have had to purchase equipment for each location, but now its employees and clients in remote facilities can work as if they were located in the main building.
In May, Ekinops announced that FiberNet Telecom Group (News - Alert), Inc., a provider of complex interconnection services, had selected its Ekinops 360 multi-reach optical transport system for the deployment of 10 Gigabit Ethernet services. Recently, the company introduced a multi-protocol/multi-rate add/drop multiplexing capability that will dramatically reduce the cost of aggregating converged traffic in business Ethernet, triple-play, wireless backhaul and broadband backhaul applications.
Raja Singh Chaudhary is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raja's articles, please visit his columnist page.
Edited by Kelly McGuire

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