February 4, 2003, St. Louis, MO: One of the greatly touted advantages of DTV transmission is the ability to allocate all the bandwidth to one large HD stream or separate the bandwidth into three or four different lower bandwidth streams. This advantage presented a significant opportunity for PBS stations around the country—allowing them to broadcast several educational and college credit classes at lower bitrates during the day and then allocating all the bandwidth to high bitrate gorgeous HD signals during prime time. It also presented a potential problem. How do viewers know where they should tune in to see their favorite programs at any given time? If all the bandwidth is allocated to the high bandwidth HD channel, what do viewers see on the other two or three channels that were available during the day?

Ideally, the viewer’s DTV receiver would recognize the different bandwidth allocation and handle it gracefully. In reality, not all DTV receivers are the same and not all handle the situation gracefully at all. Just leaving customers hanging with dead air or worse was not acceptable to most PBS stations. So they set about creating "barker channel programming". This simply means that a small stream is used to inform DTV viewers with simple graphics or audio that programming is temporarily suspended on that specific channel and to either wait until that program returns or to select another program stream (for example, HD) elsewhere on that channel.

At first glance, the use of a low bit rate program stream would seem straightforward. In fact, very few DTV encoders can be set for bit rates of less than 1.5 Mbps for video program streams. That’s where MPEG Power Professional DTV SD came into play.

"The MPEG Power Professional DTV SD encoder will encode an MPEG stream at virtually any bit rate," said Dave Roy, Director of Telecommunications at Maine PBS. "We simply encoded a compliant MPEG stream from a fixed graphic in MPEG Power Professional DTV SD at less than 300 Kbps per second, saved the resulting file to a server and then and played it through our DTV Multiplexer. It worked great! HEURIS solved the problem and for less than $5,000 per encoder it was a bargain!"

"We have always made our MPEG Power Professional Line as fully featured and flexible as possible," said HEURIS President Brian Quandt. "I am constantly amazed at how specific features and capabilities of our product can save the day. I am thrilled our encoder could solve this problem efficiently and cost effectively."

About Maine Public Broadcasting Corporation                                                                                                             Maine Public Broadcasting Corporation is the largest member supported organization in Maine, providing public television and radio services to audiences in Maine, New Hampshire, and New Brunswick through Maine PBS and Maine Public Radio. MPBC attracts more than half a million viewers and listeners each week, and is the only informational, cultural and educational institution available to all Maine people every day. For more information visit www.mpbc.org.

About HEURIS
Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, HEURIS has served as a leading manufacturer of video compression and processing tools and applications for over a decade. From the Internet, to DVD, to HDTV to Hollywood Movies--HEURIS has developed an impressive group of award-winning tools for video production and post production applications.

Perhaps best known for its award-winning MPEG Power Professional Line of software products, HEURIS has recently released two new products for the Hollywood Market: a Digital Dailies solution developed in conjunction with partner Cohen Communications and MPEG Power Professional—D-Cinema used to encode High Definition pictures for display in movie theaters.

In addition to such major motion picture studios as MGM, HEURIS proudly includes the following as its customers: NASA, Walt Disney, Sea World, Apple Computers, The Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, Taco Bell Corporation, The Home Depot, AT & T Labs, IBM, Boeing, Vanderbilt University, Boston Museum of Science and the U.S. Military. More information about HEURIS Logic is available at www.heuris.com.