EBU Awards T-VIPS Winter Olympic Gold

Vancouver IBC, Brussels, Geneva and Zurich

Eurovision, the EBU’s Operation Unit manages the contribution links between the Whistler winter Olympic facilities, the Vancouver International Broadcasting Center (IBC) and onward to Brussels, Zurich and Geneva POPs. After extensive testing ahead of the event, the EBU installed a number of CP541 Seamless Monitoring Switches at the reception points at the Vancouver IBC, Brussels, Geneva and Zurich. Moreover, the CP541s are managed and controlled by the Eurovision team in Vancouver and Geneva using a T-VIPS Connect Management system, a powerful and user friendly management application.

True seamless redundancy

“The EBU have a strict requirement to provide the highest possible service level on our transmissions to our members and customers. A true seamless redundancy contribution solution is therefore critical to our business. We selected the T-VIPS CP541 Monitoring Switch for our Olympic transmissions since the CP541 is one of the few monitoring switches on the market that has demonstrated full seamless operation. T-VIPS have a reputation for high reliability and they were a natural partner for us for his important event,” says Puiu Dolea, Head of Resource Management, Eurovision. “Our engineers were really impressed with the T-VIPS solution, not only does it provide truly seamless switching, but it does it with the flexibility and robustness necessary for content that’s going to be watched by millions all over Europe. We’re confident that the CP541 is one of the best seamless switches on the market.”

Europe can watch error-free Winter Olympic footage

The CP541 monitors the two incoming Transport Streams for any errors based on TRT101-290 parameters, and in the event of an error in the main backhaul line it seamlessly switches to the back-up connection. The system went live two weeks before the games started and has demonstrated high reliability from that point onward.

“The CP541 has been incredibly successful since its launch; I think that’s because it answers a real need and meets this need simply and cost-effectively,” says Johnny Dolvik, CEO, T-VIPS. “It’s always great to win a contract from the EBU as its engineering team really knows how to find and test the best solutions available. I’m really pleased that the CP541 has played an important role in ensuring that viewers throughout Europe can watch error-free Winter Olympic footage.”

About the CP541

The CP541 is part of the T-VIPS cProcessor product family, a line of compact and powerful, yet cost-effective, products designed for processing and handling of MPEG-2 transport streams. The main use of the CP541 is for intelligent 1+1 redundancy switch-over between two MPEG-2 transport streams. The unit monitors both incoming MPEG-2 transport streams for health status, with switch-over based on configurable switching criteria.