Expand video-on-demand catalogues with joint offering from Alcatel-Lucent and Concurrent

INDUSTRY

Alcatel-Lucent and Concurrent are introducing a joint offering that enables cable TV companies to significantly expand the number and variety of on-demand videos they can offer, quickly and cost-effectively.

Cable operators can then deliver these expanded video offerings to whatever device their customer prefers – from traditional TV set-top boxes to tablets, PCs or smartphones – using Alcatel-Lucent’s Velocix CDN technology and Concurrent’s MediaHawk Unified Origin and TV-VOD Edge Servers. In this way the new offering supports cable multiple service operators (MSOs) in providing their customers with the programming-rich ‘TV Everywhere’ experience they are seeking. The two companies have already completed a successful trial of this joint architecture with a large tier 1 cable MSO.

James Brickmeier, SVP, Strategic Marketing at Concurrent said: “Cable MSOs are challenged with increasing the breadth of their video-on-demand catalogs as a way to improve their competitiveness in the marketplace. With Alcatel-Lucent we have developed an architecture which allows cable operators to cost-effectively expand their catalogs to hundreds of thousands of content hours. Our joint offering enables cable operators to make this content available to customers with traditional set-top boxes, while avoiding additional investments in localized content storage arrays. Instead, they can leverage the multiscreen CDN infrastructure they are building already to access regionalized or national content storage archives.”

Paul Larbey, Vice President and General Manager of Alcatel-Lucent’s Velocix CDN activities said: “Using CDN technology, cable operators can capture a bigger piece of the market by delivering IP video services to any connected device. Thanks to the combined Alcatel-Lucent and Concurrent offering, they can now also leverage their CDNs to expand and scale their video-on-demand offering. This collaboration reflects the commitment on the part of both our companies to provide multiscreen video solutions tailored to the unique business needs of each operator.”

The offering integrates Alcatel-Lucent’s Velocix CDN solution and Concurrent’s MediaHawk™ VX origin and edge streaming solution using standardized interfaces. Alcatel-Lucent and Concurrent have been jointly promoting adoption of an open standards approach to cross-service interconnection by implementing the ‘C2’ interface which is part of the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions IPTV Interoperability Forum (ATIS IIF).