Islands Plan All Digital Conversion

Cable Bahamas plans to use EGT to facilitate its conversion to an all-digital network. Cable Bahamas will primarily use EGT’s encoders in a rollout of more than 250 digital services that the MSO will deliver in New Providence, Grand Bahama, Abaco, and Eleuthera. Cable Bahamas will use the high-speed digital signal processors found in EGT’s flagship product—called Prelude, which is the MPEG-2 digital video encoder— as well as EGT’s Aria native variable bit rate encoding software. The company states that the encoding algorithms offered by Aria provide an overall improved performance of 15 percent over traditional open-loop encoding architectures. Cable One Adds Digital Gear Cable One, which operates 52 cable systems with 710,000 subscribers in 19 states, announced that it will use BigBand Networks’ BMR (Broadband Multimedia Service Router) to manage its digital television offerings. BMR platforms are being deployed at 42 Cable One systems to control channel line-up, video quality and bandwidth efficiency of SDTV and HDTV programs. Cable One, which is a division of the Washington Post company, is also deploying BigBand’s PSIP table regeneration to make available program-relevant data, including descriptive information, closed captioning and parental control. TiVo Targets NCTC Last week we highlighted big numbers from Motorola and Scientific Atlanta on digital video recorder (DVR) shipments. Now TiVo and the National Cable Television Cooperative announced an agreement to make TiVo’s DVR service available to NCTC’s small and medium sized cable operator members.
The deal will allow the more than NCTC 1,000 cable operators, which total over 14 million subscribers, the opportunity to carry TiVo’s recording technology as a standalone service. NCTC’s member multi-channel service operators can elect to independently market the TiVo proprietary technology, brand and service to customers, in addition to the services currently provided, in areas where DVR technology was previously unavailable from their local cable operator. Chipmaker Pushes VDSL2 Conexant Systems’s Accelity VDSL/VDSL2 customer premises equipment (CPE) chipset is destined for Netopia’s MiAVo 3396PC-VGx VDSL gateway. Netopia’s "media in, audio and video out" gateway is targeted at IP-based networks that use high-speed VDSL technology in the last mile to deliver voice, video and data broadband services. Conexant says it is the only semiconductor provider to deliver production quantities of VDSL chipsets that comply with the recently consented VDSL2 standard.