Sky will use V-Nova’s Perseus codec on its IPTV platform in Italy, resulting in a halving of the average bitrate from 8Mbps to 4Mbps.
One of the most important points about the news is that the codec is being deployed as a software update. This follows the integration of the Perseus SDK with Harmonic’s ViBE VS7000 video encoders and the installed base of Sky set-top boxes in Italy – confirming V-Nova’s claims that Perseus is able to use existing hardware.
“We have been working with Sky in Italy for a long time and I am thrilled to follow the successful deployment on their contribution network with this IPTV platform upgrade… Importantly, we were able to achieve this on an infrastructure that had been already deployed without changing the existing workflows,” said Guido Meardi, V-Nova CEO and co-founder.
Analyst Comment
This news moves Perseus out of the contribution network – that is, connecting media sources to users – and into IPTV distribution. (TA)
One of the surprising claims of V-Nova last year was that the Perseus codec could support existing CPE hardware, because although it has a different compression algorithm, the software uses the same mathmatical transforms as existing codecs, so current SoCs can be used. This seems to show it was correct. (BR)
