The CulturaLive project, with participating entities such as the i2CAT research center, UPC (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya) and the business association TDI (Televisions Digitals Independents), is utterly innovative, as it develops a cross-connection of live contents by integrating IP (Internet) and DVB-T (DTT) technologies.
Currently, local televisions show a great potential regarding broadcast of local live events, but they limit their exploitation due to the lack of a specific technology that facilitates both delivery to other televisions and management of copyright. Thanks to this project, all this audiovisual work will be within the reach of larger audiences. In order to support the bandwidth required for a live high quality television, a network of interconnected servers will be available. Furthermore, the project will allow increasing audiovisual content consumption through the increasingly popular Web televisions. This, in turn, will be an alternative for all those televisions which cannot broadcast due to lack of the corresponding DTT license.
VSN is currently selling vsnIPTransfer; a solution for media content distribution over IP. The Spanish company has a growing server and client node infrastructure that will allow its customers to offer live contents' exchange service resulting from the aforementioned project. "Through the CulturaLive project, VSN has added to vsnIPTransfer the distribution over IP of media live contents with broadcast quality under digital rights license", says Jordi Gilabert, VSN R&D Director. "This solution offers three new business models for the local TV sector: new contents market, savings in signal transport as compared to satellite and the international promotion of the local live events".
The research project, which will be coming to an end next July, has been promoted by the Catalan foundation i2Cat and managed by AGAUR (Agencia de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i Recerca) with funds of the European program InfoRegio 2009. This initiative is a clear example of the interest in contributing to fostering local cultures and their communication as it will allow local producers to offer their contents to international distributors thus gaining a new market for their products and the international cultural promotion of the local customs, cities and peoples.
