Vendors Demonstrate OCAP Interoperability

Cable Television Laboratories Inc. said 24 companies, including a handful of MSOs, demonstrated a series of OpenCable Application Platform interoperability functions over several days of testing in early August.

CableLabs said the event featured successful porting of OCAP to hardware platforms from 11 different manufacturers.

"Seeing our EPG [electronic programming guide], as well as other companies' EPGs, running seamlessly on 11 different hardware platforms on the same network was totally groundbreaking," said Mike Hayashi, senior vice president of subscriber technologies and advanced engineering at Time Warner Cable and head of the OpenCable Certification Board, in a prepared statement.

OCAP implementers included Aircode Co. Ltd., Alticast Corp., Humax Co. Ltd., LG Electronics, Motorola Inc., NDS Group plc, Osmosys S.A., Panasonic Consumer Electronics, Pioneer New Media Technologies Inc., Samsung Electronics America Inc. and Time Warner Cable.

Time Warner Cable and Comcast Corp. demonstrated their OCAP Development LLC stack on Scientific-Atlanta Inc.'s “3250” hardware platform. Middleware from Osmosys was demonstrated on Advanced Digital Broadcast hardware.

Other participants were Digital Keystone Inc., Digisoft LLC, Emuse Technologies, Gist Communications Inc., S&T, Unisoft Corp., Vidiom Systems Corp., Tektronix Inc., Softel Ltd., Thales Broadcast & Multimedia and The Weather Channel.