Digital
Rapids is providing transcoding capabilities to enable the availability of video
highlights from this year’s NAB Show on
the Web and mobile devices.

Throughout this year’s NAB Show in Las Vegas, production teams will be capturing and
editing video of the event, including daily highlights; studio segments; and attendee
and exhibitor interviews. The Digital Rapids Transcode Manager automated, scalable
transcoding system is being used to encode finished video segments into the formats
required for Web and mobile viewing. The resulting high-quality media files are then
delivered to Web content distribution provider Highwinds and mobile distribution provider
HipCricket for on-demand delivery to viewers.

Digital Rapids Transcode Manager automates high-quality, multi-format transcoding
workflows. Scalable from sm all transcoding farms to enterprise-level operations,
Transcode Manager is ideal for both dedicated transcoding applications and as part
of complete ingest-through-delivery media workflows.

The complete line of Digital Rapids solutions is being showcased in booth number SL6213
at the 2009 NAB Show, April 20-23 in Las Vegas.

Credit:
NAB Show Brings Video Highlights and Interviews to Web and Mobile Viewers

With
U.S. households reluctant to cancel home services despite the down economy, growth
in cable and IPTV VoD services will remain strong, with revenues exceeding $11 billion
by 2013, according to Parks
Associates. The international research firm is hosting the pre-show workshop Monetizing
Connectivity in the Home on June 2, 2009, at CONNECTIONS, to analyze the opportunities
and successful business strategies for advanced products and services.

CONNECTIONS: The
Digital Living Conference and Showcase, taking place in Santa Clara, Calif., June
2-4, tracks developments, trends, and opportunities in the four key areas Communications
& Entertainment Services, New Media and Digital Content, Home Systems, and Consumer
Electronics. The Parks Associates pre-show workshop is an excellent primer to the
event and includes research and forecasts for interactive video services, mobile solutions,
energy management, advertising, and connected devices.

“Currently 37% of U.S. digital cable customers use premium VoD regularly, up from
21% in late 2004,” said Kurt Scherf, vice president, principal analyst, Parks Associates.
“The cable companies need to use this type of service to combat challenges from telco/IPTV
services, which grew over 110% in subscriptions from 2007 to 2008.”

At the workshop, the Parks Associates analyst team will provide comprehensive insight,
analysis, and forecasts of the digital living markets, including consumer research
and the best strategies on how to gain and retain customers in a difficult economy.

Workshop Sessions:

• Unlocking Interactive Television Services

• Connected Consumer Electronics – Cloud Media and Servers

• Mobile Innovations: Service, Hardware, and Applications

• Advertising in a Three-screen World

• Digital Home Technical Support

• Energy Management

CONNECTIONS includes interactive panels with over 80 speakers, moderated by Parks
Associates’ expert analysts and featuring the latest research on converging content,
services, and hardware.

Excerpted from:
Cable and IPTV VoD Resistant to Economic Trends, Revenues to Exceed $11 Billion in 2013

The MPEG
Industry Forum announces that 16 member companies will be exhibiting at NAB2009,
taking place in Las Vegas, NV between Monday, 20 April and Thursday 23 April 2009.
MPEGIF will present the MPEGIF Master Class titled “The New World of Digital Television”
on Sunday, 19 April 2009. Organized in conjunction with the National Association of
Broadcasters, this special event will explore how new technologies are changing the
way digital multimedia is created, compressed, delivered and monetized.

Business and technology leaders will share their experiences and unique industry insights
at this year’s Master Class that feature keynote speakers including Starz, NTV Plus,
Snell & Wilcox, Nielsen, MobiTV, Advanced Media Ventures, and the Open IPTV Forum.
The keynote speakers will be joined by panelists comprising operators and other leading
technology pioneers and industry analysts such as Motorola, DIRECTV, AT&T, PBS, Isis
Digital, MPEG LA, Intel, Verimatrix, the EBU, informitv and IPTV Americas.

This MPEGIF Master Class will provide information to help organizations from all sectors
make important decisions with service operators, who have been adopting new video
technologies over recent years sharing their experiences to date.

The MPEG Industry Forum is also hosting a networking party at the Harley-Davidson
Café on Tuesday, April 21 from 8:00 – 12:00 a.m. This networking event will be the
perfect place to enjoy wonderful food and drinks, meet the speakers from the MPEGIF
Master Class and relax with clients and colleagues.

The NAB2009
MPEGIF Member Exhibitor Guide, as well as the invitation for the MPEGIF Networking
Party can be downloaded.

Companies exhibiting include:

Amino Communications     C2054
Cisco   		 S214LMR
dicas   		 C1362
DivX/MainConcept   	 SU14102
Envivio   		 SU2424
Fraunhofer IIS   	 SL6023
Harmonic Inc   		 SU7209
Hitachi   		 C5018
Mitsubishi Electric   	 SL6510
Motorola   		 SU4417
NagraVision   		 SU5017
NTT   			 SU11617, SU11723
Qualcomm   		 C2146, OE429
Tandberg Television   	 SU5108
Tektronix   		 N2522
VBrick   		 SL4513

Excerpted from:
Over 15 MPEG Industry Members Exhibiting at NAB2009

SaskTel will
commercially deploy xVu, Mariner’s revolutionary
IPTV Service Assurance platform. xVu will be deployed across SaskTel’s 70,000+ Max
Entertainment Services (IPTV) customers to provide continuous monitoring and real
time feedback of customer’s Quality of Experience. The platform will allow SaskTel
to proactively manage its IPTV service quality, and to identify and resolve issues
often before the customer even realizes there is a problem. xVu monitors QoE of IPTV
services during installation, supporting a ‘right first time’ approach. Post-installation,
xVu enables network and customer support personnel to proactively monitor IPTV service
delivery and resolve issues, the majority of time before a call has been received
from any customers.

SaskTel first launched Max Entertainment Services in 2002, as one of North America’s
first IPTV services to combine television, high speed internet access and the ability
to surf the Web on the TV, all for one low price. Subsequently, SaskTel has introduced
video on demand services, DTVR functionality, and recently became the first provider
in North America to commercially deploy HDTV as part of an IPTV offering.

By taking a unique “customer-centric” approach to IP Video service assurance, Mariner’s
xVu eclipses traditional “network-centric” quality of service practices because the
solution captures and correlates QoE indicators from across the ecosystem, including
in-home performance. As a result, xVu can deliver timely and meaningful visibility
into service performance from the viewer’s standpoint on a continuous and real-time
basis, reducing the high operational costs inherent in the current reactive servicing
model, and reducing churn associated with service quality experience.

See the original post here:
SaskTel Turns to Mariner for Real-Time IPTV Service Assurance

EPON (Ethernet Passive Optical Network) chip provider Teknovus has announced the commercial deployment of 2Gbps EPON FTTx in the fiber networks of Japan-based telecoms service provider KDDI.
California-based Teknovus provides EPON chips for use in triple-play services on FTTx broadband access networks.
Its 2.5G Turbo-EPON chips are the first 2G EPON chips in the world to be [...]

View original here:
Teknovus and KDDI deploy 2.G Turbo-EPON