Middle-Eastern and North African members of the award-winning MENOS-ASBU exchange service set to broadcast Olympics in High Definition

TUNIS, Tunisia, and SINT-NIKLAAS, Belgium, 16 April 2012 The Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU) announced today that it has selected Newtec to upgrade its members’ infrastructure to bring the first fully High Definition (HD) Olympic Games to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

The infrastructure upgrades will allow the ASBU members to receive the live Olympic multilateral feeds and news channels in HD and will also turnaround the HD signals to provide SD simultaneous broadcast (simulcast). The Olympic content will be injected into the central archive of the ASBU Multimedia Exchange Network over Satellite (MENOS™), allowing members to access the content at a later time and eliminating the need for each member to individually archive all feeds. This will result in significant cost reductions and operational streamlining.

Slaheddine Maaoui, ASBU Director General, said: “The Olympic Games have always been major milestones for us, for the introduction of new platforms, technologies and services. London 2012 will be the first HD Olympics for many of our members, together with comprehensive MENOS simulcast, content archiving and playout."

MENOS multimedia network was officially launched by ASBU in January 2009. The award-winning platform supports multiple simultaneous managed exchange services for use by broadcasting organisations throughout the MENA region.

"The HD upgrades for the Olympics will benefit the ASBU MENOS users way beyond the games themselves," said Serge Van Herck, CEO of Newtec. "The improvements in satellite efficiency and video compression allow the ASBU and its members to benefit from higher quality HD services without any need for additional satellite bandwidth, keeping the operational costs under control."

Many of the video and audio services have been developed to meet the exacting needs of the broadcasting industry and now will enable other great sporting events to be enjoyed in best quality throughout the region.

"The Olympics HD upgrade is part of an on-going process of service expansion and improvement, to address the future broadcast transmission needs of our members and regional users," Maaoui added.

For further information about MENOS visit www.newtec.eu/MENOS.