What technology do you require to stream a TV channel?

[neilw]

Hi,

I'd like to know more about the technology involved in (what appears) to be streaming video live into venues... (although I may be wrong) and would appreciate anyone who can point me in the right direction as to what hardware would be required.

The type of set up I am referring to is companies who (for example) Sub TV who have the plasma screens in student union bars. They claim to have a 'channel' which is sent by satellite? into the venues. Other companies do a similar service for WHSmith TV and so on.

ANyone know where I can gain info on this type of technology or which hardware companies could help.

[harlequin]

there are a few of these channels carried by astra , ( same satellites as the ones sky broadcasts from ).
there was a company at videoforum talking about this , Alan etc went to see the talk ( i think ) so maybe one of them knows more about it.
the set up costs weren't astronomical , but more than i could afford to think of spending.

[PaulD]

Hi
I went (and found the talk fascinating). The company was NTL Broadcast. The Sky charges were quoted as £75,000 p.a. (although there is a thread here in the forums where somebody disputed that figure as being too low) + a smaller Licence fee.

That's to get into the Sky EPG for public viewing - charges may be lower for a private channel.

The scale of charges here show why there are 30+ shopping channels - its probably cheaper to run a channel than rent shops on the high street ;)

[cstv]

Paul, surely you mean "Arqiva" (http://www.ntlbroadcast.com/) ;)

[GG]

If you want to do VoIP yourself, then it can be done very cheaply and easly. If you wish to stream Freeview channels you need a PC with several DVB-T cards and a copy of VLC (http://www.videolan.org/) It's free BTW. You run the multiple instances of VLC-server on the PC with the tuners or capture cards. Then any PC on the network also running VLC player can playback the streams, you can run multiple instances of the player on one PC too. VLC will also run on most platforms.

I have already used this technology at work for monitoring a DTT multiplex over our local LAN, it works very well. However in my case I was using TSreader to strip the wanted PID's from the MUX and record them to a .ts file (MPEG) then VLC streams the currently recording file over IP. for viewing in our workshop on as many PC's as we like.

Oh, VLC also supports DVB (bitmap) subtitles.

I can see big office RF ring-mains going this way. Video over IP.

GG.

[cstv]

don't forget to stream as multicast though, otherwise your bandwidth usage will just go up and up and up! :)

mark.