Weekly Pix

Demos Abound at CableLabs Winter Conference CableLabs will be hosting its winter conference next week in Colorado Springs at The Broadmoor. Some of the top cable execs will be on hand for the conference, as well as various vendor suitors. Some of the demonstrations slated for the event include ICTV‘s mosaic solution that is designed to enable cable system operators, programmers and integrators to deploy interactive multichannel mosaics, which can be aligned to reflect individual subscribers’ viewing preferences. In addition to providing live video from, and navigation through, multiple channels simultaneously, the ICTV technology will enable personal mosaics to be assembled by subscriber, operator or programmer choice, or via system response to subscriber viewing habits, all on any digital set-top box. Tropic Networks will demonstrate its open architecture approach to optical networking, enabling cable operators to deliver voice, video and high-speed data services over a single integrated network. The demonstration will highlight Tropic’s wavelength tracking technology and managed alien wavelength transport. Broadbus will demo the ability to time-shift live TV into a traditional VOD environment. BigBand‘s switched unicast technology will be on display at the Broadmoor, and the demo will also highlight the benefits of BigBand’s M-CMTS platforms that use edge QAM devices. VCom Decoder Gets Adelphia, Cox Approval Earlier this week, VCom announced that after successful field testing, its edge decoder was approved by Adelphia Communications and Cox Communications. VCom’s edge decoder performs MPEG decoding, analog modulation and upconversion for up to 24 NTSC/PAL channels in a 1-RU chassis. It is also capable of supporting baseband and RF outputs as well as over-the-air reference options in the same chassis. Widevine  Enters HD-DVD Copy Protection Market Widevine Technologies, a provider of comprehensive downloadable content protection and digital forensics for video operators, announced it will provide digital copy protection for high definition DVD-based content delivery formats Blu-ray and HD-DVD. Widevine Cypher for high-definition DVD players is expected to protect devices available at retail in summer 2006 and extend Widevine’s PC content protection to include Blu-ray and HD-DVD devices that run on Microsoft‘s new Vista operating system, available later in the year.