Four very different Thomson products won awards at IBC2007, demonstrating the breadth of the company‘s offering as well as the excellence of its solutions. It took two “Pick Hit” awards from Broadcast Engineering magazine, a “Best of IBC” award from TVB Europe plus the best content on demand prize in the Cable & Satellite International Awards.

The C&SI award recognized that Thomson, with its SmartVision service management platform and Sapphire high-bandwidth server, offers a complete video on demand package that is well integrated, simple to implement and proven by many service providers. Together they give cable and IPTV operators a swift and seamless way to deliver compelling services such as network timeshifting and catch-up television as well as video on demand.



TVB Europe magazine made the new generation of ViBE MPEG-4 encoders from Thomson one of its Best of IBC winners. The new encoders provide unrivalled compression performance thanks to the use of Mustang, a dedicated digital video processing chip developed by Thomson. By using this bespoke chip the new ViBE encoders can take advantage of the complete MPEG-4 toolkit, allowing it to deliver high quality high definition television in as little as 4 Mb/s.

The first of the Broadcast Engineering Pick Hit awards went to the Grass Valley Infinity™ Digital Media Camcorder from Thomson, the highly innovative, multi-format acquisition device. Infinity captures standard definition and high definition images and sound, recording them onto a choice of open formats including REV PRO disks, professional grade Compact Flash cards, and USB or Firewire drives. IBC TV News this year was shot entirely in HD, using three Infinity camcorders recording to REV PRO disks.

The second Pick Hit award went to the Ignite integrated production solution from Thomson. Ignite is designed to produce news and other live event programming with a minimum of technical staff, allowing resources to be diverted to more creative and productive tasks. During a broadcast a single operator can control the complete production from a touch-screen user interface, maintaining a consistent and dynamic look and feel to the content.

For information about Grass Valley products from Thomson please visit www.thomsongrassvalley.com.