Envivio has announced that its 4Caster C4 video encoder is being used by Bouygues Telecom, said to be one of France's largest mobile network operators with ten million subscribers, to encode video for its TV 3G+ mobile video service. The Bouygues Telecom video headend is hosted by Cognacq-Jay Image, the content management and delivery subsidiary of TDF. TV 3G+ provides subscribers with access to more than 60 channels in a variety of standard and premium packages.
When launching the new service in November 2008, Bouygues Telecom and Cognacq-Jay Image elected to replace their legacy software encoders with the 4Caster C4 hardware encoder configured for Mobile TV. The multi-profile 4Caster C4 enables the TV 3G+ service to be optimized for the 176 different handsets currently in use by Bouygues Telecom subscribers. This includes a QVGA resolution, 3.5G HSDPA profile to deliver premium video quality for subscribers with high end devices.
"4Caster C4 from Envivio has helped us by delivering the reliability and performance needed to provide a good quality of experience for the end user, as well as flexibility that is enabling our company to follow the fast-moving mobile market." said Thibaut Keraval in charge of Mobile Services Solutions in Bouygues Telecom.
"Upgrading the existing infrastructure to an up-to-date Envivio platform was an important decision in the development of TV 3G+," said David Karoutchi, Business Development Manager – Mobile & Broadband, Cognacq-Jay Image. "The 4Caster C4 provides a high reliability, high performance foundation that offers the superior service levels we were looking for in order to ensure the best experience for subscribers."
The Envivio 4Caster C4 simultaneously delivers four channels of video with up to 32 different Mobile TV profiles per system, providing a compression platform for operators launching new services or upgrading early generation services based on software encoding platforms. The Bouygues Telecom deployment also includes the Envivio 4Manager headend management system, providing M:N automatic redundancy configuration for true carrier-grade service availability. This is claimed to transform mobile TV into a full-fledged service offering, based on a state-of-the-art professional headend infrastructure.