Sky Latin America

<%=company1%> designed and equipped the video and audio facilities of Sky Latin America's satellite uplink and operations facility in Miami Lakes. The facility collects programming from multiple sources for 24-hour a day digital direct-to-home (DTH) transmission of 280 channels with crystal-clear pictures and CD-quality sound.

Miami Lakes, a $140 million Satellite Broadcast Center, is the fourth and by far the largest playout system for Sky Latin America. It is considered to be the largest and most advanced DVB digital broadcast facility in the world.

The DTH system is the first ever to connect uplink sites from three different locations to provide a single major satellite service. AFA built video and audio facilities at their Northvale, NJ headquarters, and then shipped to three different destinations: Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, and Miami Lakes, FL. In addition, AFA provided installation and training of on-site personnel in all three sites.

The three Sky uplink centers deliver 24-hour direct-to-home (DTH) digital television service via satellite to subscribers residing in four Sky footprint areas - Brazil, Mexico, North South America and South South America.

The movies, commercial promos and interstitials are played out of a network of digital disc recorders. The disc recorders are networked together using a main and back-up Fibre channel ring. Turn-arounds and local channels are received either by fiber or satellite and routed to a special digital processor providing analog video to SDI (Serial Digital) conversion, frame synchronization, digital noise reduction and embedding of four (4) audio channels before being output to the routing system.