Undersea Research Robot Broadcasts Teleprecense Video over Satellite/IP

A recent underwater, "telepresence" experiment conducted by famed oceanographer Dr. Robert Ballard carried broadcast quality images from the Black Sea to students, scientists and the general public in the U.S. The project involved remotely operated underwater vehicles and the latest in video content acquisition and delivery technology on an archeological mission in the the Black Sea. Because the bottom two-thirds of the Black Sea lacks oxygen, it is considered an area ripe for marine exploration.


Two SDI "show feeds" generated aboard a U.S. Navy research vessel were sent to two TANDBERG Television E5710 video encoders, compressed using MPEG-2 technology, and multiplexed into a single stream for transmission using a TANDBERG Television MX5620 multiplexer. The output of the multiplexer was sent to a TANDBERG TT6120 MediaLink and output as IP traffic, which became a two-way IP feed over satellite for transmission to the new Institute for Archaeological Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island.


The TANDBERG encoding equipment was installed on the ship and the signal was uplinked via a shipboard satellite dish. The satellite signals were received by an MCI earth station in Andover, Maine,
and sent via a private DS3 link to EDS in Plano, Texas. There they were redirected over Southern Methodist University's network to SMU's Internet2 POP and out to the campus of the University of Rhode Island.
http://www.tandbergtv.com