Cox Hooks Up with Gemstar

With this week’s announcement about a "long term multi-service agreement" with Gemstar-TV Guide International, Cox Communications is gearing up for future OCAP deployments. The deal calls for Cox’s future deployment of Gemstar-TV Guide IPGs, the cable industry’s most widely deployed IPGs, which are currently available in approximately 14 million homes. Over the term of the agreement, Gemstar-TV Guide will work with Cox on developing the appropriate technological solutions that will enable Gemstar-TV Guide IPGs to be deployed on the full range of digital receivers in use across Cox’s systems. "Providing an excellent user interface to our customers is critically important and will be even more so in the future," said Cox’s Steve Necessary, vice president, Video Product Development, in a press release. "We are confident in our selection of this world-class solution for our near and long-term needs. The anticipated implementation of the IPG on the TV Works ‘TV Navigator’ middleware solution and on OCAP middleware is indicative of Cox’s and Gemstar-TV Guide’s commitment to that technology direction." BitBand Unveils IPTV Video Server The stream of IPTV-related news releases continues unabated this year. This week, BitBand said that it’s expanding the company’s offering in the IPTV market space with the release of a new high capacity video-streaming server. According to a press release, BitBand new server has higher throughput streaming and an ingest engine that fits into the company’s hybrid cluster architecture. With the new technology, BitBand provides solutions to a larger curve of storage/streaming requirements. General availability is expected in Q2 2006 providing several models, including a RAM-based model with 5.4Gbps from 1RU specially designed for edge caching of popular VOD and PLTV. Latens Island Bound Latens, which offers software-based security for IPTV and Pay-TV, said that it has been selected by Ålands Datakommunication (Alcom) to provide security for its IPTV services.
 
 Alcom will multicast MPEG-2 Single Program Transport Stream (SPTS) content encoded as MPEG-2 (SD and HD) and MPEG-4/AVC video using IP streamers to IP-set top receivers provided by Kreatel. Northport Modulution provides the middleware for the Alcom system. TV content will be encrypted using the Latens Stream Encryption Engine fed from an Anevia streamer, the VOD content provided by the Anevia VOD streamers will be encrypted by the Latens VOD Encryption Engine, with both VOD and TV services protected by Latens FCAS. Alcom is based on the Aland Islands, an autonomous Swedish speaking province of Finland. Aptiv Digital Deploys Multi-Room DVR Solution Aptiv Digital (formerly Pioneer) announced the deployment of its Multi-Room DVR solution with Blue Ridge Communications. The new application operates with new versions of Passport and Passport Echo Interactive Program Guides (IPG), enabling Blue Ridge Communications to offer multi-room access of programming content that is stored on a central DVR set-top. The implementation of new digital cable set-top technology transforms the cable wiring in a home into an RF network that allows for up to three basic digital set-tops (clients) in a home to access a central DVR set-top (server). Passport, an IPG for basic digital cable set-tops, and Passport Echo, an IPG for DVR digital cable set-tops are typically deployed together into digital cable homes with multiple set-tops. Now with the new Multi-Room DVR application, the two IPGs can operate directly together to offer customers the ability to view their stored programming anywhere within the cable home network.