OREANDA-NEWS. February 17, 2010. Company TTK announced it has been awarded a contract by Eurovision to help transmit the HDTV signal for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver from central Europe into and throughout the Russian Federation. Tens of millions of viewers are expected to tune in across Russia to top TV stations Channel 1 and Channel Russia, and TTK will be responsible for delivering an uninterrupted, HD-quality and frequently live signal from the Eurovision’s points of presence (PoPs) in Frankfurt and Helsinki to Moscow. The project will involve provisioning of new STM-1 and STM-4 capacity leased lines between these locations, reported the press-centre of TTK. 

“From the point of view of utilizing our data-transit skills and capacity, this is a very important and prestigious project for TTK,” explained Igor Kelshev, senior VP for International Operations at TTK. “It also confirms TTK’s reputation for providing fast, high-quality signal transmission with unparalleled reliability. Our experiences in providing similar transit services around the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing make me confident with Vancouver 2010 Games.”

In 2008, TTK worked with TeliaSonera and China Netcom on a similar project, successfully transmitting over 4,000 hours of coverage from the Beijing Olympics to more than 1 billion people (nearly a quarter of the Games’ total global audience) in the European Broadcasting Area via Eurovision’s PoPs. During this three-month period, not a single second of signal was dropped.

Eurovision put the Winter Olympics project out for tender in early 2009, and TTK, as part of a consortium with TeliaSonera, Colt, Synterra, AT&T and Deutsche Telekom, set to work to respond to the demanding brief immediately. TTK worked out several different pricing options and technical approaches to the capacity provisioning challenges it knew would arise before submitting its bid so that, by the time Eurovision announced its pitch shortlist, TTK had already developed full details for the layout of data-traffic transit and its commercial offer.

According to Eurovision Operations Director Stefan Kuerten: “
“Eurovision is the premier distributor of sports and news content for the world’s top broadcast and media platforms, and we are delighted to be working with TTK in our goal to provide our customers with the programming they want in a seamless, reliable and cost-effective way.