27th March 2012, Hamburg, Germany: Exterity, the leading provider of IPTV communication solutions, was selected to equip Spiegel’s new production facility in Hamburg with their market leading IP-based TV and video distribution technology.

Installed by German specialist Perfect Media Solutions (PMS), the IPTV solution supplies a combination of 47 SD and HD TV channels simultaneously to 600 members of staff throughout the new facility. All of this was achieve by PMS in less than 1 week.

The channels distributed are a mixture of live broadcast TV captured using an Exterity DVB-S2 TVgateway (taking channels from Astra and Hotbird) and in-house TV channels using HD-SDI encoders from the SpiegleTV playout/post-production centres and via WAN from outside broadcast studios. All the channels can be view at staff computers using AvediaPlayer Desktop or on screens attached to the 160 AvediaPlayer receivers situated throughout the building.

Spiegel chose Exterity’s solution because of their flexible approach to IPTV, utilising industry standard technologies to ensure interoperability between Spiegel’s key systems. This included integration with Active Directory for username/password controlled access to video playback and TV channels. Additional factors of choosing an Exterity IPTV system included the ability to play back video on both PCs and Macs, superior reliability and the quality offered by a digital solution over such a large site and number of users.

“Reliability and flexibility were key requirements for TV distribution when we moved to our new office. We wanted a solution that would cope with intense use from our growing staff base. Traditional TV distribution systems simply couldn’t cope with the number of users or provide the user experience we wanted – with on-demand EPG information and a web-based GUI,” said Mr Kiehne, Group Head of IT management in the Spiegel publishing house, “Opting for an IPTV system from Exterity provided everything we wanted for our new offices.”

“Our integration capability is one of the key messages at Exterity,” explains Colin Farquhar, CEO, Exterity, “Unlike some providers, we work seamlessly with a variety of 3rd party technologies to offer companies like Spiegel the ideal communications platform for TV and video distribution. By doing this, integrators like PMS know installing an Exterity IPTV system allow them to deliver what their customers need.”