PONANT is the only French cruise line and a world leader in Polar cruising. Now, PONANT can provide its passengers with live TV broadcasts wherever its ships are in the world.This new service started just in time to simultaneously broadcast the 2015 American Super Bowl live to all of its cruise liners. Paying attention to even the smallest details, PONANT matches the content it broadcasts to each ship according to the passengers on board, for example US channels and news for American passengers, French content for French passengers.

The live content is gathered at PONANT's headquarters in Marseille where it is encoded using a Sumavision encoder.The content is then sent to each ship via VSAT Internet satellite connection. PONANT is planning to add another cruise ship to the fleet, which will happen in a couple of months. Ensuring that passengers will enjoy excellent quality live TV is a simple matter of replicating the proven VideoFlow DVP (Digital Video Protection) solution.

Live video broadcasts are sent as a continuous bit stream, which IP networks were never designed to handle. Even so, VideoFlow technology ensures that no packet is lost and the packet jitter caused by transiting the IP network is nullified. By doing so, it affords the opportunity to lower the costs of uninterrupted, live high, quality video service in place of existing, but more expensive solutions.

The DVP comes as a "Plug and Play" pair - a Protector, which stores the packets until it is certain that they have been correctly received, and a Sentinel which monitors the health of the video stream by watching for packet loss and requests packets to be resent from the Protector's cache only if required.

VideoFlow will exhibit at NAB 2015 in booth SU 11124.