CableLabs Innovation Showcase: The Other Demos

This week, CableLabs announced that attendees of its summer conference in Colorado had picked Prime Sense’s IR-based 3-D gesture-sensing TV control technology as the “best new idea” out of a group of 11 vendors (see CableLabs Confab High On Virtual TV Remote Control).

Here’s a summary of the runner-ups — the other 10 presenting companies and their demos:

Aerohive Networks: a wireless local area network architecture that uses “intelligent access points and distributed control protocols” to eliminate the need for wireless LAN controllers. The approach would let MSOs offer business subscribers a managed wireless LAN service that supports voice, video and data with service-level agreements, according to the company.

Alcatel-Lucent: broadcast of “crowd-casting” live, user-generated video to the TV via mobile phones (e.g., Dad shooting a soccer game and sending it to Grandma on her TV); 3-D user interfaces to “enhance and differentiate a cable operator’s digital TV offering,” based on Adobe Flash Lite 3 and Philips’ WOWvx technology to display 3-D without using additional devices or special glasses.

Arris: IP video and interactive advertising delivery over bonded DOCSIS 3.0 channels. The demo showed several cable modems connected to a CMTS through either none or very few RF splitters. (See IP Video Demos On Deck For CableLabs Conference.)

AudioCodes: “HD VoIP,” a combination of technologies that would let cable operators surpass traditional phone network quality. HD VoIP uses wide-band voice compression algorithms and other fidelity improvements.

Ceton: technology to deliver up to six channels of premium HD programming to a PC and securely distribute them to multiple TV sets in the home, from a single CableCard using real-time DRM transcription.

Elemental Technologies: low-cost video-processing system based on off-the-shelf hardware it calls “graphics processing units.” (See Video Startup Raises $7.1 Million in Funding.)

FreedTV Systems: television programming combined with Web communications and social networking to create “a unique participatory experience for destination viewing,” with “virtual TV rooms” to let friends chat in real-time.

Openet: “Content Anywhere” solution for managing real-time authentication, authorization and other entitlement interactions required across multiple networks and domains.

Tandberg Television: latest version of its OpenStream platform is designed to let operators use existing VOD infrastructure to deliver content to multiple devices; features demo’d include “session-shifting,” allowing a subscriber to pause playback on a PC and resuming playback on a TV or iPhone. (See IP Video Demos On Deck For CableLabs Conference.)

Verivue: VOD platform for delivering time-shifted television and other media applications to set-tops, PCs and mobile devices. (See VOD Goes Super-Size.)