Colombia. On November 18, the French company Thomson held a test session in Bogotá of some of its new equipment, aimed at both pay-TV operators and television channels. The event was organized by AVCOM, Thomson's distributor in Venezuela and Colombia.
Mikel Darrigues, sales director for Latin America, explained to TVyVideo+Radio what this day consisted of: "We had two sessions, one for Pay-TV operators and one for broadcasters, for both Thomson has solutions. Among them are 4K solutions with HEVC coding, encoders that support 4K formats, much more advanced for the needs of channels that today work in HD and want to migrate to 4K".
Also introduced was fuze 1, a playout system with an embedded encoder that supports pay-TV operators in inserting commercials and serves broadcasters who need to generate secondary channels. This product was presented at NAB and is now being taken directly to customers in Latin America.
For his part, Germán Trujillo, AVCOM's broadcast sales manager, stressed that this event sought to show customers that Thomson is not only a company specialized in coding and video delivery, "it is also a leader in transcoding, commercial insertion, regionalization, OTT and IPTV platforms. We wanted to show customers that within the brand there are many more products that they may not have known about."
He added that "We have been working with Thomson for more than 12 years, since we were operating in Venezuela. It was even one of the companies that supported us when we decided to open the headquarters in Colombia."
2015 was a good year for Thomson. According to Mikel Darrigues, it ends with an outstanding market penetration with its technologies in Europe, since it is a French company, but it also has an important participation in Latin America, with clients such as Sky, DirecTV, among others. Its presence in the region is through direct offices, but mainly with its distributors in each country.
