VOD equipment provider, Concurrent Computer, says that cable operator, Shekou CATV, has selected its MediaHawk VOD platform to power the first commercially available VOD service in China. In addition, Shekou is using a content-acquisition and pre-processing system that has been developed by Concurrent’s China office for the specific requirements of the Chinese market. The deal will also see Concurrent partnering with Chinese technology company, SZCOM, to equip the latter’s existing set-top boxes for advanced two-way cable services: it is currently testing the interoperability of its VOD platform with a special add-on hardware module from SZCOM, the IPR 200, which is designed to enable low-cost one-way digital set-tops to be upgraded with two-way functionality. "Shekou is the first operator to bring video-on-demand services to China because of strong partners like Concurrent," Shekou CATV deputy director, Liu Qingqing, said in a prepared statement. "When Shekou initially set out to launch this new service, we relied on an alternate vendor that failed to meet our timeline. Concurrent was able to immediately integrate their server technology with our backend, greatly accelerating our on-demand launch."
Shekou CATV launched VOD service last month to customers in the city of Shekou, in China’s Shenzhen province. The operator claims to have around 30,000 digital cable subscribers and around 10,000 broadband data subscribers.
In other Concurrent news: the company says that Morristown Utility Systems, which provides utility, phone and television services to greater Morristown, Tennessee, has launched VOD service using its new MediaHawk Small Market Server (SMS) platform. The service, which launched last month and which is delivered over a new fiber-optic network, provides several hundred hours of on-demand movies and premium and free cable content. Concurrent positions the MediaHawk SMS–which it will be demo’ing at the upcoming SCTE Cable-Tec Expo (takes place in Denver, June 20th-23rd)–as a low-cost, turnkey VOD solution for smaller cable systems (i.e. with up to 4,800 digital customers): the platform separates the video streaming engine from content-storage arrays, allowing operators to scale video streams or storage independently, and thereby, Concurrent says, improving flexibility and reducing equipment costs. According to the company, the platform supports up to 480 simultaneous streams and 860 hours of MPEG-2-encoded content, and can easily be expanded to support more streams and provide more storage.
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