Fujitsu has developed a new High-Definition (HD) video encoder to enable station-to-station transmission between TV Asahi and All Nippon Network (ANN) affiliated companies.

The new service enables high quality video transmission from station-to-station using inexpensive broadband public IP lines.

With an introduction of terrestrial digital broadcasting and large display TVs for consumer use, the Japanese broadcasting industry has seen increases in transmission of HD Video programming for news and sports between stations and affiliates. Transmission of HD Video content over broadband IP network is becoming popular in Japan due to advancements in encoding technology as well as deployment of inexpensive broadband networks.

Fujitsu employed MPEG4 AVC (also known as H.264) encoding technology in its IP-9500 Video Encoder, launched in November 2006, that realizes more than twice the video compression compared with current MPEG-2 compression without compromising picture quality. With this new compression technology, transmission of HD video content from station-to-station is now possible over public optical fiber lines.