French transcoder maker Ateme this week said it had landed a key Chinese contract for 4K encoders with the largest Chinese cable group, but forgot to say who it was with. The release did mention Inspur who provided the installation which it described as a leading systems integrator and set top manufacturer, but forgot to mention that it works very tightly with the Shandong Cable Network, which has 25 million home in China.
This makes this deal as big as if the small French firm landed a deal with Comcast. The installation is for the Ateme Titan Live and File multi-codec transcoder for Shandong’s first 4K HEVC main screen service.
Multi-codec systems are currently in great demand to output HEVC channels and H.264 and even legacy MPEG 2 – because the days when an encoder was for a single channel has gone, and the Titan’s might be working on two or more formats at once. They can do any resolution from 4k down to mobile. Ateme came out of the contribution codec business and is rapidly growing alongside keen rival Elemental, with both of them lately making a big deal out of 4K and their support for linear channels, not just VoD.
Ateme says that its Titan is a virtualized software encoder based on Intel server class CPUs and makes the point, almost directly aimed at Elemental that it doesn’t rely for video processing on GPU or other hardware acceleration. Elemental is known to have pushed GPUs as one of its main differentiators, and attributes their use as one of the reasons is got to 4K ahead of the pack.
Ateme says it now has thousands of deployed channels, and claims it was first to market with a standard compliant HEVC Main 10 Profile, be that as it may Elemental seemed to us to make all the running, and had 4K demonstrations at shows throughout 2012, while the Ateme product launch was in September 2013, but we have no information on when the two applied for compliance tests.
This is the type of deal that is big enough to show up on Ateme quarterly results and should buoy it up for multiple quarters.
“To ensure successful and on-time project delivery, we looked for a ready-to-market solution with high video quality,” said Tony Hao,Inspur General Manager. “After testing several solutions, we found Ateme to be the right solution in terms of readiness and video quality that was required by our tier one cable customer.”
Last week we reported that Broadcom shipped a 4Kp60 SoC based on the 7252 into the Chinese market and has won favor with it at the Inspur Group, where it was headed for Shandong.