Winding Up 'VOD in a Box'
Turnkey Service To Give Small Ops On-Demand Play
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 2/4/2007 7:00:00 PM
Want to offer video on demand but can't afford to hire another guy to run it?
You may be in luck: Comcast Media Center and C-COR are teaming up to provide small operators what they're claiming is a fully managed, turnkey video-on-demand service that includes up to 1,000 hours of programming per month.
The duo's “VOD in a Box service,” aimed at operators with fewer than 25,000 customers, uses C-COR's n5C scaled-down video server with content encoded and aggregated by Comcast Media Center, a Denver-based unit of the cable company.
“We want to minimize the capital and operating costs of offering VOD, to help small operators grow their business and put them in the same competitive position as the larger MSOs,” Comcast Media Center chief operating officer Gary Traver said.
| Spec Sheet |
|---|
| VOD In a Box |
| Source: Multichannel News research |
| Content: Up to 1,000 hours of pay-per-view, subscription and free on-demand video per month |
| Headend equipment: C-COR's n5C VOD pump, VOD back-office server, satellite receiver and terminal server |
| Capacity: Between 5,000 and 25,000 subscribers; up to 1,400 streams |
| Pricing: Depends on number of streams and subscribers |
| Availability: Entering trials in Q1 2007 |
1,000 HOURS
The service will provide operators with 1,000 hours of subscription, pay-per-view and free content programming. Fewer than 20 programmers will offer content through the service, but Traver wouldn't disclose their names. “They're the ones you would think of,” he said.
Mike Pohl, president of global strategies at C-COR, said pricing will vary depending on the number of streams and subscribers in a system. It's not literally in a single box, but all the headend equipment required for the service, including the video server and VOD “catcher,” will fit into half of a standard data-center rack, he said.
“This is preconfigured to go in and make that operational expertise available, so the operator can manage the system as little or as much as they want to,” Pohl said.
VOD in a Box provides an Internet portal for affiliates, offering access to VOD assets by programmer and tracking when programming has propagated successfully.
Comcast Media Center and C-COR said customer trials of the VOD in a Box service will start in the first quarter. The initial beta site is independent operator Wave Broadband's Ventura, Calif., system, which has fewer than 5,000 digital subscribers.
For cable in general, VOD has proven to be a popular service offering that can reduce subscriber churn. In the first half of 2006, VOD services reached 86% of the 30.4 million digital cable homes in the U.S., according to Kagan Research.
The pitch from Comcast Media Center and C-COR is that their service can make VOD cost-effective for the little guys. VOD in a Box customers won't need an on-site asset management system or content management personnel, Traver said.
Comcast Media Center's operations team handles the process of acquiring and managing the content, including pitching VOD content to the C-COR servers and providing quality-assurance monitoring. The company, which has about 500 employees, will support VOD in a Box service using the same call-center and technical personnel that handle its Headend In the Sky (HITS) service, Traver said.
“We distribute a huge amount of VOD content today,” he said. “We've taken our VOD content delivery system and embellished it for small-market operators.”
Comcast Media Center currently delivers 1,200 hours of VOD content per month for more than 85 networks and other content sources. It provides VOD content for more than 15 million households served by 20 cable operators.
If a customer doesn't have an agreement to carry a specific programmer's VOD content, “we'll basically check a box on our side and say, 'Don't deliver that to the headend,' ” Comcast Media Center senior director of new media Mitch Weinraub said. “We'll manage it all the way through.”
FEET ON THE STREET
Comcast Media Center has already staffed up on the sales side to put more feet on the street to sell VOD in a Box and other services, with the hiring of three new salespeople, said spokesman Andy Holdgate. CMC has also restructured the sales team so that “it will be clear who has a primary contact for the content side, and who will be in the MSO camp,” he said.
The VOD in a Box service will include a barker channel to promote on-demand content offered through the service. “One of the things we've seen from VOD in the marketplace is that it's important to call attention to what's out there, to have subscribers go from impulse to response,” Weinraub said.
Also last week, Comcast Media Center announced a new brand name for its HITS services: HITS Quantum.
HITS Quantum encompasses the company's legacy 64 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) platform as well as its more recently launched 256-QAM all-digital service, which provides digital feeds for more than 50 cable TV networks.
In the past eight years, CMC said, it has made five substantial upgrades to its 64-QAM HITS platform, including providing digital program insertion (DPI) triggers for ad-supported digital TV networks.
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