Southampton, UK – New Zealand-based Kordia and TVWorks have selected Tandberg Television’s digital terrestrial television (DTT) head-end system to deliver its Freeview New Zealand DTT service. Freeview digital terrestrial network will deploy new MPEG-4 AVC solutions to provide 75% of New Zealanders with a new HDTV service as well as SD programming. Trials are due to begin month, with the launch set for early next year. Freeview New Zealand is a free-to-air digital TV service transmitting SD programming in MPEG-2 across the country via its satellite direct to home (DTH) platform. The new DTT system will use Tandberg Television’s solutions including the iSIS 8000 IP head-end and MPEG-4 AVC encoders which offers video encoding, IP multiplexing and new receiver/decoders. The system functions under a single control and management system, nCompass. In addition, the Tandberg MX8400 IP Multiplexer will provide open standards to Kordia and TVWorks, and the combination of Reflex remote statistical multiplexing over IP as well as an advanced multiplexing architecture maximizes usage of available bit-rate. MPEG-4 AVC video compression and IP technologies are expected to enable Kordia and TVWorks to deliver more channels in less bandwidth and maintain picture quality. The overall improvement in picture quality versus performance is expected to be 50% over traditional MPEG-2 systems.