Inmarsat introduces 'budget' satellite broadband service

Stuart Corner
Monday, 21 June 2010 09:09

Business IT - Networking

Inmarsat has added 176kpbs streaming rate option to its Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) range of satellite services designed for news organisations wanting to upload video from 'off network' locations.

Inmarsat says the new service, launched at CommunicAsia in Singapore last week, will be suitable for talking head shots, low movement and relatively static backgrounds, is compatible with existing video codecs and is accessible through the existing BGAN hardware that many news crews already use.

"The 176kbps streaming rate is an entry-level service for broadcasters who want to try live video streaming," said Drew Brandy, director of land mobile services at Inmarsat. "It provides smaller broadcasters with similar broadcast capabilities to those enjoyed by the major international networks.

"With 176kbps streaming, the more budget-conscious broadcaster can still deliver decent quality video to their viewers at a lower price point. It offers an additional choice to broadcasters who don't want to use BGAN X-Stream or our 256kbps streaming rate."

He said that, although the new 176kbps service can be used with existing codecs, Inmarsat has also worked with codec developers to produce low cost software codecs for use with the service.

"We realised that to deliver our services to these new market segments we could not just focus on the airtime; we needed to focus on the end to end experience. To deploy codecs to a large number of teams can be very expensive."

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