Getting there wasn’t half the fun

Intrepid trekkers to this week’s CableLabs Summer Conference in Keystone ran into an immoveable object Sunday in the form of a rockslide on Interstate 70 in Colorado, trapping many attendees for hours on end before being re-routed over another mountain pass. According to one conference goer, IPTV was a hot topic during one of the sessions Tuesday morning while data took center stage on Monday. All aboard Broadbus Broadbus Technologies unveiled Content Commander 2.0 in Keystone. Cable operators can use Content Commander 2.0 to provide subscribers with hours of on-demand local information such as news, town hall assemblies and local sports events. It allows operators to capture live or taped content, assign the appropriate metadata, export packages to the back office application and ultimately publish to the set-top. The real- time encoding capability decreases the time it takes to capture and encode CableLabs compliant content. Content Commander 2.0 is built upon an open architecture and is not dependent on any one platform. BigBand demos modular CMTS BigBand Networks took the opportunity at Keystone to showcase the first live operation of its Cuda modular cable modem termination system (CMTS), which was paired with BigBand’s Broadband Multimedia-Service Edge (BME) platform. The Cuda and BME jointly achieve over 100 Mbps per single media access control (MAC) domain. According to BigBand, the modular CMTS design quadruples DOCSIS MAC processing to 3 Gbps per Cuda platform. The demonstration included 16 unique high definition video streams of approximately 10 Mbps each that were delivered to 16 computers using existing cable modems. Looking towards the future, BigBand also showcased addressable advertising over a unicast platform in Keystone. SBC hooks up with Motorola, S-A SBC covered its bases when it announced on Thursday that contracts were awarded to both Scientific-Atlanta and Motorola for Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) set-top boxes that will enable customers to access TV programming, video-on-demand, interactive applications and other advanced features that are part of SBC’s U-verse family of services. The contracts give equal market opportunity to both vendors and continue through the end of 2008. Project Lightspeed is the SBC initiative to expand its fiber-optics network deeper into neighborhoods to deliver SBC U-verse TV, voice and high-speed Internet access services. Survey says… A survey released this week by J. D. Power and Associates (www.jdpower.com) says although cable and satellite providers have been actively promoting DVRs, only 12 percent of their customers own a DVR system. On the plus side, 41 percent of consumers said they are likely to use a DVR system in the future. Cable has a 35 percent to 23 percent edge over satellite in DVR usage, with 22 percent of DVR owners using Tivo systems. The study also found that 21 percent of consumers ordered a video on demand (VOD) program, which is a decline of 1 percent over last year.