Oslo, Norway, May 21^th, 2014 – Appear TV, a leading global provider of next-generation video processing platforms for broadcast and IP television, today announced that RCS & RDS, the leading Romanian provider of communication and television services, has selected Appear TV head-ends for a major upgrade of its cable TV infrastructure and enhancement of services to its customers.

The project will see RCS & RDS deploy 38 Appear TV XC5000 series video processing platforms for downlinking & distributing both analogue RF and digital channels across its network in Hungary and Romania. The project is being delivered by Romtek Electronics, a leading system integrator and Appear TV Romanian business partner.

“The flexibility of our carrier-class XC5000 series for signal and video processing makes it ideal in a simulcast digital and analogue RF network,” said Carl Walter Holst, CEO of Appear TV. “Appear TV look forward to providing innovative video solutions to leading class service providers such as RCS & RDS today and in the future.”

The Appear TV flexible approach to video processing platform design ensures that service content needs to be packaged and distributed once around the RCS & RDS IP ring network. The centrally delivered services over IP are filtered and adapted at the edge for regional distribution, maximizing core network efficiency. This approach also makes it easy for RCS & RDS to efficiently carry out a staged digital migration and extend digital services to even more customers. Each head-end is fitted with input redundancy and consists of decoders as well as both analog and digital TV modulators, which enables each to simulcast 80 analog channels and more than 100 digital channels on the network, including 19 HD channels.

“The flexibility of its solutions and its industry leading experience of catering for cable networks comprised of digital and RF made Appear TV the perfect video processing platform vendor for us. Additionally, the high-density and flexibility of solutions made it much easier economically for us to deploy the redundancy levels we required. The 38 head-ends are now operational and the deployment has progressed incredibly smoothly. I look forward to Appear TV head-ends playing their part in entertaining our cable customers for many years to come,” said Emil Grecu, Chief Technology Officer, RCS & RDS.

The advanced features of Appear TV head-end modules include:

• Central, regional & edge of network capable head-end solutions for cable, terrestrial, satellite & IP based delivery networks

• Fully integrated & versatile modular architecture allows operators to customise and scale the head-end for today and tomorrow
• Comprehensive I/0 signal interfaces with powerful Transport Stream processing capability & multiplexing
• High density decoding & descrambling for re-distribution and service grooming
• Higher order modulation for all carriers & high capacity IP streaming
• Broadcast quality, high channel density multi-format transcoding & encoding

• Multiple level redundancy, hot swap functionality integrated in 1 or 4RU carrier class chassis incorporating a web-based control UI
• Advanced hardware-based encoding and the high flexibility of Appear TV head-ends make them ideal for operators looking to migrate to an advanced next generation multiscreen strategy.