UPC Hungary Nets Cable Europe Innovation Honor

UPC Hungary, along with vendor partners ActiveVideo and Metrological, shared the Cable Europe Innovation Award, presented Thursday at the Cable Congress event in Brussels.

Cable Europe announced the selection on Twitter

Cable Europe also announced that Stephen Kelly, communications architect at Liberty Cable, won the the Cable Europe Fellow Award, recognized in part for his role in the launch of the Virgin Media London Underground Wi-Fi solution, deployed in advance of the 2012 Summer Olympics, and, more recently, for defining Liberty Global’s Pan European Wii Architecture. He is has also been a key contributor to CableLabs’s development of industry-wide WiFi specifications and standards, Cable Europe said. 

UPC Hungary, ActiveVideo and Metrological, meanwhile, were recognized for the recent launch of a cloud-based platform that enables the MSO to offer a wide range of apps, including YouTube, on legacy, non-IP set-top boxes. The set-up is supported by StreamCast, a new component for ActiveVideo’s CloudTV system that converts interfaces, video and other content from Web formats to versions that can be rendered on older set-tops, and Metrological’s app platform. Watch this video for more.

According to the awards entry, UPC Hungary launched the offering to 520,000 set-tops in two phases, noting that 68% of subs have tried the service, and 83% have returned for additional views, and that customers are streaming more than 1 million minutes per day of YouTube content.

Other finalists for this year’s Cable Europe Innovation Award included a cloud video engine for the real-time generation of interactive channels by R, R, Syntheractive & Cinfo, and OptimizAIR 2.0, a system from Celeno Communications that Telenet is using to turn home routers into community WiFi hotspots.