SES ASTRA SHOWCASES HDTV AT IBC 2003

SES ASTRA, an SES GLOBAL company (Luxembourg and Frankfurt Stock Exchanges: SESG), is pleased to announce its first public technology demonstration of High Definition Television (HDTV) via the ASTRA satellite system at 19.2° East during IBC in Amsterdam.

The market for High Definition Television (HDTV) in Europe is starting to get into motion after HDTV is being already successfully introduced in the US and in Asia. The mass production and promotion of large flat screen displays is well under way and costs are expected to drop significantly over the next few years.

At the ASTRA stand (hall 1.269) two HDTV transmissions can be watched on 50-inch High Definition Plasma screens.

One feed is using MPEG-2 compression and is showing high definition content of EURO1080, the first European HDTV channel.

The second feed is using Windows Media 9 (WM9) technology as one example of newer compression schemes that will allow broadcasters to transmit HDTV content already at bit rates of about 6 - 8 Mbit/s, as opposed to the 15 - 18 Mbit/s currently required using the MPEG2 compression standard.

Another promising candidate for such newer compression schemes is MPEG-4 Part 10, which is currently in the standardization phase.

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