CMC Intros VOD Service, Picks Vendors

The Comcast Media Center is introducing "Express Lane," a service for VOD content providers, at The Cable Show. Express Lane features automated workflows and remote management capabilities for allowing video networks, advertisers, cable operators and other content services companies to accelerate the delivery of VOD content to near real time by publishing their VOD content directly into the CMC’s VOD distribution platform, which currently reaches more than 30 million VOD-enabled households across the country.

In addition, the CMC’s Express Lane service is designed to allow VOD content providers to direct the delivery of individual VOD assets to specific cable system headends. It also adds the functionality to post VOD programming to a "bull pen" where content providers can preview the video programming and select the cable systems that should receive a particular VOD asset. It will be demonstrated in the CMC’s booth (1613) at the show.

In other CMC news, Strategy & Technology’s TSBroadcaster2 interactive play-out appliance is being used by the CMC’s HITS Advanced Interactive Services (AxIS) platform to showcase more than a dozen iTV applications that are being delivered over a live cable headend. It will be demonstrated in the "The Lofts at Fast Lane" Broadband Nation exhibit at The Cable Show.

Also, iCueTV and the CMC have entered into an agreement to validate iCueTV’s t-commerce, voting/polling, and RFI fulfillment platform, moving the company closer toward first market deployment. The agreement is intended to pave the way for cable operators that have signed on as beta sites for the CMC’s HITS AxIS service to test t-commerce and RFI set-top box applications integrated into iCueTV’s ETS platform.