RENNES, France -- Thomson Video Networks (formerly the digital headend division of Grass Valley) has announced the NetProcessor 9030/40, a new addition to the market-leading NetProcessor family, and a key component in Thomson's complete solution for the digital headend. The NetProcessor 9030/40 is a dense multiplexer and advanced video processor designed to sit at the heart of any video compression system for preparing and delivering content over any network.

The DVB-T2 ready NetProcessor 9030/40 combines the multiplexing and advanced service information handling of the 9030 with the 9040's video processing capabilities, including splicing and transrating for regionalization/insertion. The NetProcessor family now features a streamlined architecture designed for easy upgrades when customers want to expand the functionality of their NetProcessor unit.

With the industry's most efficient multiplexing algorithm, the NetProcessor 9030/40 combines and packs hundreds of services into transport streams with an unequalled 0.04 percent overhead — allowing costly spectrum to be used to its maximum capacity. This industry-leading performance is achieved by the NetProcessor's advanced service and bitrate policing of incoming transport streams, combined with fully adaptive playout of Service Information. Service Information (PSI/SI/PSIP) is notoriously bursty by nature and often requires costly overhead buffering, reducing available bandwidth for the encoders. With its highly efficient and fully adaptive SI playout engine the NetProcessor 9030/40 optimizes this stream, increasing the bandwidth utilization and enabling increased picture quality.

Technicolor (Euronext Paris: TCH; NYSE: TCH)