On June 24, 2020, a parade was held on Red Square, dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War. Many saw this grand spectacle.
The parade was broadcasted throughout Russia and in many other countries around the world. The video coverage of the event was made with equipment of a well-known German company. WISI, a well renowned German company for television headend and distribution systems, will be celebrating 30 years of market presence thoughout Russia in 2021.
The beginnings of WISI in Russia
| 1991: | The German company WISI enters the Russian market. |
| 1993: | In search of projects and reliable partners WISI’s manager Heinrich Heibel meets Oleg Chebotarenko, chief engineer of Satellite company, which was founded in 1992. |
| 1994: | Orders for large SMATV systems are received for the buildings of the Federation Council, the White House, the Kremlin and others. The engineers Oleg Chebotarenko and his young colleague Yuri Evseev, assembled a 19″ rack based headend on the basis of VO/VP/VF modular concept later followed by the OV Topline Headend, which, thanks to its reliability and well-designed construction has attained legendary status. They were the starting point for the business with CATV and other collective reception systems operators. On the territory of former USSR during the period of 1995-2016 more than 11000 chassis of the OV Topline Headend were sold. |
| 2021: | WISI is not standing still. Digital and IP transmission rule the market. The successors to the legendary OV are Chameleon and Tangram Headends that are also hugely popular with professionals. |
1) Oleg Chebotarenko and Yuri Evseev next to the station at the White House in 1994.
2) The headend equipment, that was used to broadcast the victory parade in Moscow in 2020.
3) Yuri Evseev next to the WISI Headend equipment for the parade broadcast in 2020.
Technological case: ensuring the broadcasting of the Victory Day parade
On the eve of the 75th anniversary of victory in the Great Patriotic War, the company received another challenge: to ensure broadcasting of the Victory Day parade. The television companies had to create a picture for broadcasting it on millions of television sets, and the contractor had to deliver it quickly and reliably to the accredited broadcasting stations and end users.
WISI and Satellite took on the task as the system providers. The system integrator was Telenova, owned by the already experienced Yuri Evseev.
The task of broadcasting two TV channels – the parade and the information program of the VGTRK host broadcaster from the press centre in Manezh to the accreditation points in the reception of the State Duma and at Vnukovo airport was difficult and demanding. The transmission in Full HD format had to be done in real time with maximum reliability and minimum delay.
The traditional solution – organising a dedicated point-to-point link – is quite costly and time-consuming. As it is now known, the decision to hold the parade and its exact date were decided by the country’s leadership almost on the eve of the event. A solution was found: it was proposed to use the public internet as the transmission medium and to use the new technology SRT – Secure Reliable Transport. Other video streaming protocols have a number of disadvantages – signal delays, creation of excessive traffic, bit rate limitations. In some cases they are proprietary protocols, which makes it difficult to harmonise equipment from different manufacturers.
The latest SRT protocol is an open standard supported by the technology vendor community and enables product diversity. It avoids the risks and costs associated with being tied to just one vendor.
WISI, as a member of the SRT Alliance group of companies, has made its equipment compatible with that of other vendors and Satellite and Telenova have chosen to use it. The streamer transcoder based on WISI INCA 4440 platform worked as a part of SRT headend equipment and provided transmission of two channels to receiving points.
At the input of the system channels for broadcasting were delivered in uncompressed digital format using SDI interface, with embedded audio channels and 1080i resolution to the headend. Here the programs received from VGTRK were encoded into MPEG H264 broadcast format preserving 1080i resolution and multiplexed into MPTS broadcast package. This was transmitted by SRT transmitter based on WISI INCA 4440 platform to remote stations.
Reception of SRT streams and broadcasting of channels to remote locations was provided by WISI Chameleon Headend modules, as well as reception of other satellite broadcast content and processing of programs for broadcast in the Manezh.
The equipment and the technical solution from WISI paid off. The hardware analysis revealed virtually no transmission errors, and the 1080i HD signal was delivered with a delay not exceeding 3.2 ms. According to Yuri Evseev, the solution based on INCA and Chameleon, platforms demonstrated by WISI at CSTB 2020 winter exhibition, was in favour of SRT technology, and trust in the partners’ high level of expertise was a guarantee of successful and timely completion of the mission.
