Vendors Pitch Products at CableLabs Retreat

Scores of companies anted up $10,000 for display areas at Cable Television Laboratories Inc.’s closed-door summer conference, which kicked off Sunday in Keystone, Colo.

• Broadbus Technologies Inc. debuted its new “Content Commander 2.0” software, featuring “Broadbus News On Demand,” allowing operators to store local news programs for later on-demand viewing.

Content Commander allows operators to capture live content, assign metadata, export packages to back-office applications and store it on servers.

Broadbus said Time Warner Cable is using the application. Shrewsbury Electric and Cable is also using the software to store town meetings, high-school sports and other community-interest programs.

• Scientific-Atlanta Inc. showcased its new digital-content manager and “WT-24000” intelligent wavelength-transport products with next-generation MPEG (Moving Picture Expert Group) digital-video processing and metro-optical transport.

S-A said the new gear enables 20 times the MPEG-processing capability as traditional multiplexing equipment.

• BigBand Networks Inc. demonstrated its “Cuda” cable-modem-termination systems and “BME” broadband-multimedia service-edge platforms, jointly delivering broadband services to Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification cable modems.

Part of the demonstration included service delivery of 100 megabits per second. BigBand said its modular CMTS design provides for 3-gigabit-per-second speeds per Cuda platform. The modular CMTS approach will allow operators to introduce channel bonding and dynamically allocate bandwidth between DOCSIS and video services inside edge QAMs (quadrature amplitude modulation).

• Terayon Communication Systems Inc. was demoing its “CP 7600G” edge decoder for digital simulcasts, program redundancy on its “DM 6400 Network CherryPicker” and local ad insertion.

• Sandvine Inc. showcased software that can help voice-over-Internet-protocol subscribers to deal with Internet-traffic problems. The company was demoing a malicious traffic attack during a video-telephony call. Sandvine software would redirect the subscriber’s next HTTP session to a captive portal, where the subscriber would be advised to cleanse his network and upgrade to more secure product tiers.

Sandvine has integrated with Camiant Inc.’s policy server and Motorola Inc.’s CMTS.

• Broadcom Corp. announced its “AVC/VC-1” system-on-a-chip solutions for advanced set-top boxes, which reduced bandwidth needs by at least 50%. The new “BCM740x” series is available for HD and digital-video-recorder set-tops, and it is available for Pace Micro Systems plc, Thomson Consumer Electronics and Samsung Electronics America Inc. boxes.

• Glowpoint Inc. showcased Sony Electronics Corp.’s “Instant Video Everywhere” for two-way-video VoIP applications.