September 11, 2008: COMSTAR – United TeleSystems (COMSTAR-UTS JSC, LSE: CMST), the leading supplier of integrated telecommunication solutions in Russia and the CIS, announced that COMSTAR-Direct CJSC, the largest broadband Internet provider (STREAM brand), member of COMSTAR-UTS, had upgraded its IPTV head-end to provide MPEG-4 AVC coding and transcoding. The project was implemented in partnership with TANDBERG Television supplied the iPlex solution – multi-functional video processing platform.

Victor Belov, CTO of COMSTAR-Direct, says, “We were one of the first to introduce IPTV offering in the market. To retain our leadership, we have to both improve customer service and use innovations. The new solution fits well into our compression system and will help us to “compress” bandwidth for standard resolution TV from 4 Mbps to 1.2 Mbps without quality degradation. Also we will be able to launch new services such as Picture-in-picture . This is the first large-scale MPEG-4 AVC project in Russia. Besides, the new system supports the future migration of all channels to HD without equipment replacement. The only thing that will be necessarily is device reconfiguration.”

As a result, COMSTAR-Direct can convert wide-spread MPEG-2 programs into MPEG-4 AVC without additional coding and recoding. This enables more effective utilization of subscriber broadband channel as MPEG-4 AVC requires much smaller bandwidth than MPEG-2. Such transcoding method retains picture quality and facilitates resynchronization of video with subtitles.

The transcoding feature embedded in IPTV head-end of COMSTAR-Direct is a part of TANDBERG iPlex UltraCompression solution providing IPTV video processing and transcoding. ISPA, a partner of TANDBERG Television in Russia, is responsible for the transcoding system supply, launch and support.
Pavel Sulikovski, Sales Director of TANDBERG Television, says, “MPEG-4 AVC compression ensures high-quality picture with much smaller bandwidth than MPEG-2. Today the video is mostly delivered in MPEG-2, so transcoding is a very important feature. And we offer it to the leading Internet provider in Russia.”