DISTRIBUTION
November 2017
23
Asia represents key market as SES Video
looks to expand growth into 2018
SES Video recently expanded its Asia-Pacific
capabilities with the appointment of Yew Weng
Soo (left) as vice-president, sales and market
development; and John Huddle as director,
market development, Asia-Pacific.
APB catches up with Yew to find out more
about the company’s strategy for Asia-Pacific in
2018, and beyond.
How will SES Video’s Asia-Pacific
growth strategy evolve into
2018?
Yew Weng Soo: We created SES
Video to consolidate our capabili-
ties and empower our customers
to capture new business opportu-
nities throughout the video value
chain. As we move into 2018, we
will continue to execute on our
growth strategy, which is threefold.
First, we continue to serve
our long-term customers via our
reliable fleet. Within Asia-Pacific,
we serve our broadcast customers
from two prime video positions in
the region, 108.2°E via the SES-7
and SES-9 satellites, and 95°E via
NSS-6 and SES-8. From these or-
bital locations, we support some of
the most dynamic pay-TV opera-
tors in India, the Philippines and
Indonesia.
To enhance support for our
customers, we are also bringing
plenty of new capacity to the
market in the next few years. In
Asia-Pacific, this begins with the
launch of SES-12, our first hybrid
satellite for the region, in Q1 2018.
SES-12 consists of traditional wide
beams and concentrated spot
beams that will expand our video
and broadcasting capabilities from
the satellite’s location at 95°E. With
an increasing amount of localised
content being produced at both
the country and regional level,
SES-12’s spot beam capabilities will
enable video customers to deliver
different types of content, whether
by local language or genre, to spe-
Ateme supports Casablanca
Online’s DSNG fleet
Casablanca Online, a Latin American
video service provider, has upgraded
its digital satellite newsgathering
(DSNG) fleet with Ateme’s Kyrion
encoders and decoders.
Based on Ateme’s fifth-genera-
tion Stream compression engine, the
Kyrion encoder/decoder provides the
“best baseband video quality at mini-
mum bitrates”, according to Ateme.
The solution has also been designed
for contribution over satellite and IP
networks, with added value features
such as ultra-fast boot, ultra-low
latency and ABR output.
Alex Pimental, general man-
ager at Casablanca Online, explained:
“Casablanca Online is committed
to offering tailor-made, exclusive
solutions to its customers. We dif-
ferentiate ourselves through our
content search for innovation, and
for that reason we selected Ateme.
The company has a strong reputation
for successfully delivering techno-
logical innovations to the broadcast
industry.”
According to Pimental, Ateme
offers the “most advanced” imple-
mentations of the MPEG-2, MPEG-4
AVC/H.264 and HEVC/H.265 codecs.
“The company’s Kyrion solutions meet
market demand in terms of latency,
modulation and bandwidth savings:
HEVC/H.265 encoding technology
paired with DVB-S2x provides effi
ciency savings of 50%. We are now
able to take advantage of better
video compression with far less
bandwidth while improving the
video quality in terms of resolution,
contrast and colour,” he added.
Casablanca Online is also not a
first-time user of Ateme solutions,
having deployed the company’s
encoders and decoders to cover
major sporting events such as the
2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016
Rio Olympic Games. Gustavo Dutra,
country manager Brazil for broad-
cast and content provider market,
Ateme, concluded: “Casablanca
Online has placed its trust in us
again and chosen our high-quality
and cost-effective contribution so-
lutions to renew their DSNG fleet in
Latin America.
“The ARQ support that’s inte-
grated into the Kyrion encoder/
decoder will also enable seamless
contribution over the Internet. Once
more, we have provided Casablanca
Online with a complete solution for
transmitting live video content.”
cific areas within the r