OCAP Wrap

Vidiom Systems unofficially kicked off National with a Sun morning session on CableLabs’ OpenCable Application Platform standard and its impact on the cable industry, application designers and consumer electronics industry. "We like to call [2006] the year of OCAP," said Vidiom’s Keith Bechard, vp, biz dev, when asked how realistic MSOs’ deployment plans are this year. Time Warner Cable, Comcast, Cox, Charter and other companies made a splash at the Consumer Electronics Show in Jan by outlining the markets where they would have OCAP deployed to some degree by 4Q. Long a work in progress, OCAP falls within the broader OpenCable initiative, which CableLabs launched in 1997 to promote the deployment of interactive services over cable. OCAP is a stack of middleware software that resides between applications and the operating system within a consumer electronics device such as a set-top box or OCAP-compliant TV set. Bechard cited political and economic pressures as 2 motivating factors for OCAP deployments. Amanda Jervis, Vidiom’s manager of training and support, said a revamped version of OpenCable 1.0, which was frozen from further development by CableLabs last year, could be completed by June. A rough draft of OpenCable 1.1, which includes upgrades to the Java platform, could be completed near the end of this year.