PARIS and AMSTERDAM -- The Italian mobile operator, 3 Italia, has built a new operation centre for the mobile television services La3 TV, based on an integrated solution from Thomson (Euronext Paris: 18453; NYSE: TMS), the worldwide leader in video solutions. 3 Italia operates Europe’s largest DVB-H service with over 850,000 subscribers in Italy. The new Thomson mobile video headend allows 3 Italia to manage encoding and delivery in house, with the capability to broadcast up to 20 channels over DVB-H, with superior picture quality.

The solution is based on Thomson’s ViBE Mobile TV encoder to achieve the highest possible quality of MPEG-4 compression, optimizing the bandwidth available for mobile television.

Thomson engineers provided systems design, integration, commissioning and training services for the whole implementation. The installation was completed in a record-timeframe, and handed over in July 2008.

“We have been selected for Europe’s largest mobile TV services, and Thomson’s mobile TV solutions are at the heart of some of the most important deployments worldwide” said Patrick Montliaud, Senior Vice President of Thomson’s Networks and Integration Solutions within the Systems division. “We look forward to accompanying 3 Italia with our scalable solutions as their user base grows even further.”

3 Italia