TVNZ USES HD EMBEDDERS FOR OLYMPIC BROADCASTS TO 104 COUNTRIES (December 2008)

New Zealand's public television broadcaster TVNZ used 16 of Crystal Vision's TANDEM HD-21 High Definition audio embedders/de-embedders to add commentary to more than 800 hours of coverage from the Beijing Olympics and Paralympics, with the broadcasts distributed to 104 countries around the world and watched by more New Zealanders than any other television event.

The TANDEM HD-21s were located in the equipment room of TVNZ's space in the International Broadcast Centre in Beijing.

The Olympics host broadcaster supplied all 40 incoming feeds to TVNZ with eight embedded audio channels. TVNZ needed to replace the Low-Frequency Effects channel with mono commentary on all of its coverage, and selected the TANDEM HD-21 for this purpose because it could overwrite a single audio channel and also had the benefit of being a space-saving single module. Adding commentary at the start of the production chain ensured the pictures and international sound always had the right commentary, whether it was being taken live to air in the production suite or recorded on a server for later replay.

All the events requiring commentary were routed through the 16 TANDEM HD-21s. HD signals from the host feeds were switched from a central router into the TANDEM HD-21s and then back into the router for use within the TVNZ production facility.

TVNZ also used a large number of Demon de-embedding monitors to de-embed the down converted output from the TANDEMs to allow the effects and commentary to be mixed before transmission.

The HD signal was transmitted to New Zealand, South Africa, Asia and the Arab States, and was also down converted and distributed to 104 countries.

The TANDEM HD-21s, which were supplied via Crystal Vision's distributor for Australia and New Zealand Mastatek, will be used for events work in the future.

TVNZ will be taking advantage of the configurability of the TANDEMs and will be fitting analogue output piggybacks this time to allow simultaneous de-embedding of the incoming signal.