March 20, 2019 – Murrieta, CA – The American Forces Network (AFN) has signed a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with DigitalGlue to provide maintenance, software updates, and support for all four of AFN’s transmission systems as well as their management system, all of which were designed and installed by DigitalGlue in 2017. AFN is the worldwide radio and television network serving U.S. troops, U.S. Navy ships, Department of Defense employees, government civilians, and their families stationed overseas. DigitalGlue is a leading equipment, integration, and software development provider for the production and distribution of digital video.
“We are honored to have earned AFN’s confidence in DigitalGlue, not once but continuously over the past several years,” explained Sean Busby, DigitalGlue president. “First by designing and delivering multiple transmission systems, next by trusting us to customize our own PriSMS management system to match their needs, and last by selecting us to stay on-board to maintain and service all the systems since they launched in 2017. We look forward to many more years of supporting AFN and providing exciting new features during the coming months.”
DigitalGlue provided AFN with four standalone MPEG-4 AVC multichannel compression systems in 2017 with DVB-S/S2 RF modulation allowing their standard definition channels to be upgraded to high definition. The new system also added a Simulcrypt Verimatrix conditional access system to the existing PowerVu conditional access system, enabling an economical path to the latest technology while not interrupting the currently deployed set-top box base. DigitalGlue’s in-house software development and engineering team overcame numerous hurdles including having to re-engineer and reconfigure equipment functionality to achieve the desired architecture for networking, automatic redundancy switching, and interfacing the Subscriber Management System with the Defense Enrollment Eligibility System. Despite these and numerous other challenges, the system was delivered on budget and the quality of service remains at > 99.999% availability.