Snell & Wilcox Completes Sale for Launch of HD Sports Service

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Snell & Wilcox has completed a multi-million dollar sale to MediaPro, a leading media, production, and broadcasting company based in Barcelona, Spain.

In one of the largest installations of Snell & Wilcox equipment in Europe, MediaPro is driving the newly launched simulcast of its global soccer (football) channel, GolTV, with industry-leading standards conversion and multiformat switching systems from Snell & Wilcox. GolTV is broadcasting 24/7 coverage of global soccer matches.

The GolTV HD simulcast went live to coincide with the start of regular season play for La Liga, the Spanish football league for which MediaPro has international broadcasting rights.

MediaPro has established a new production and playout center dedicated to coverage of La Liga matches, which also facilitates the GolTV HD broadcast. Eighteen Snell & Wilcox Alchemist Ph.C – HD motion-compensated standards converters are used to convert simultaneous, incoming soccer video feeds from international sources and formats to HD 1080i (50Hz) for transmission, as well as for archiving GolTV programming.

Working in concert with the Alchemist systems are 15 Snell & Wilcox Quasar Ph.C motion-compensated HDTV upconverters, which convert SD content from the incoming video feeds for broadcast on the new GolTV HD channel. To further enable the simulcast, MediaPro has installed Snell & Wilcox Kahuna multiformat SD/HD production switchers in three of its production studios for seamless mixing of content from SD sources into the HD production.

"The quality of the final broadcast output is MediaPro's top priority, but meeting quality goals can be challenging when you're working with video content that comes in from all over the world, in a variety of SD and HD formats. Therefore, we knew we needed the absolute finest conversion and mixing technology available," said Israel Esteban, technical director of Unitecnic, the MediaPro engineering subsidiary that designed and implemented the new production center. "The Snell & Wilcox Alchemist Ph.C – HD, Quasar Ph.C, and Kahuna technology are well-known as the industry gold standard, and we knew they would provide the flexibility we needed to receive, produce, and generate any signal in any format, no matter how our production requirements might change at the last minute."

Over the past three years, MediaPro has structured its production facilities based on the Snell & Wilcox IQ Modular infrastructure system. With more than 300 intelligent component building blocks, IQ Modular components give customers the flexibility to construct any type of broadcasting facility. "Our complex installation would not have been possible without our IQ modular infrastructure, which we use for everything from control and monitoring to routing and distribution, video and audio processing, and analog-to-digital conversion," said Esteban. "These components give our facility the flexibility to accept and deliver any type of video or audio signal such as composite, SDI, HD-SDI, analog, AES, or embedded."

MediaPro is a group of companies operating in the communications industry which offers all the technical and creative personnel necessary to set up and broadcast any type of audiovisual product. MediaPro provides a whole range of different services in the audiovisual contents production sector and in sports and cinema rights management. It also offers consultancy services related to television and sports, the creation, design and production of themed channels, covering a wide range of different formats and genres.
MediaPro has become one of the leading players in the audiovisual market either through wholly owned companies within the group or through strategic alliances with standout companies around the world. These partnerships include France Telecom, Carlton Communications, Portugal Telecom Mutimedia and abertis telecom. MediaPro has offices in Barcelona, Madrid, Girona, Seville, Tenerife, Lisbon, Porto, Madeira, Amsterdam, Budapest, Miami and Qatar.

Unitecnic is an audiovisual service company within the Mediapro group, which provides broadcast engineering services, consultancy, project management, equipment distribution, support and customer care services. Unitecnic has years of experience in broadcast projects in Middle East, Asia, Europe and America, for clients like Al Jazeera Sports, SRPC-SRMG, ESPN, LaSexta, Belgacom and GolTV. Unitecnic has offices in Barcelona, Madrid, Seville, Lisbon, Buenos Aires and Dubai.