VITEC

May 13, 2021 - The global pandemic has impacted every person and every country around the world. As a leading provider of IP video streaming technologies, VITEC has been able to assist different types of organizations as they respond to this global challenge. In one unique application for remote distribution, VITEC was able to help TV Tiradentes and the Secretary of State for Education (SEDUC) in Brazil to enable a workflow to support remote education to students in Manaus during the pandemic.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Brazil needed a way to quickly deploy remote learning systems to respond to the crisis. Overall, Brazil has over 48 million students in its basic education system, including 27.2 million in elementary school and 7.7 million in high school. The State of Manaus is a large district under SEDUC and realized that the most readily available technology in close to 90% of homes was television. Access to internet or mobile platforms for students could be challenging, however using TV to reach students was going to be the quickest and most effective way to enable remote learning.

SEDUC introduced a program for students titled “Class at Home” that utilized broadcast channels to deliver education content over-the-air to students across the State of Manaus. VITEC's VNP400 H.264 Contribution Encoder/Decoder is at the heart of this initiative because it is a reliable bi-directional product that efficiently handles the IP video within the workflow. VITEC has delivered 3 VNP400 devices that are able to receive signals via fiber from 3 distinct learning channels provided by TV Tiradentes, a terrestrial TV station in Manaus. Since the VNP400 is bi-directional, the same unit is able to encode the signal from TV Tiradentes and encode it in AVC for the ISDB-T Transmitter to be broadcast over-the-air.

TV Tiradentes selected the VITEC VNP400 because it is a single device with the capability of both encoding and decoding a signal within the workflow. The VNP400 has a highly flexible codec that can also be configured to be a Dual Encoder or Dual Decoder, depending on the application. It supports H.264, MPEG-2 and JPEG2000 that can be configured in Ultra Low Latency mode, plus it has a dual redundant power supply for reliability. The flexibility of the VNP400 made it a great choice for TV Tiradentes to deploy their remote learning solution in Manaus.