Cogeco Selects Tandberg for VOD Back Office

Canada’s Cogeco Cable has selected Tandberg Television’s OpenStream digital services platform as its exclusive back-office system to support its on-demand services. Cogeco Cable is Canada’s fourth largest MSO with more than 400,000 digital subscribers in Quebec and Ontario.

Although OpenStream, in conjuction with Tandberg’s AdPoint products, is capable of inserting advertisements in VOD programming, Cogeco must wait until some future time when that may be permitted by the Canadian government.

"In Canada the advertising regulations are quite different than in the U.S.," said Brad Ferris, VP business development, cable, with Tandberg. "They (Canadian MSOs) are not allowed to put advertising in on-demand."

The OpenStream system will work with Cogeco’s existing Tandberg asset management system and VOD servers from Concurrent.

"The success of our back office is the ability to work effectively with other products, VOD servers, billing systems, EPGs or middleware," said Ferris.

Cogeco Cable has targeted key features of OpenStream for immediate use: for example the ability to create its own unique playlists and its Interactive Catalog for real-time catalog navigation.

-Linda Hardesty