Ericsson has equipped Tata Sky, the Indian leading direct-to-home (DTH) operator, with a head-end upgrade that enables it to launch high definition (HD) channels and also increase its standard definition (SD) channel offering. The Ericsson solution achieves dramatic bandwidth savings that allow the launch of multiple new services for 5 million Tata Sky connections. With bandwidth being such a vital commodity when launching HD services, the savings that are achieved through Ericsson’s EN8190 MPEG-4 AVC HD encoder are extremely valuable to operators. The deployment of Ericsson’s solution at Tata Sky has enabled it to offer its subscribers many HD channels with the highest picture and sound quality. Tata Sky has also deployed Ericsson’s EN8100 MPEG-2 SD encoder, which has enabled it to increase its SD channel capacity without the need for swap-out of legacy MPEG-2 consumer set-top boxes (STBs); this has been achieved by a combination of encoding improvements and other system wide optimizations.