page twenty eight www.csimagazine.com Cable & Satellite International july-august 2009

Show review

Despite difficult times, the

ANGA Cable show closed

with another record in

exhibitors and attendees, attracted more

than 13,600 trade visitors, an increase

of 13% compared to the previous year.

The number of exhibitors increased to

380 from 33 countries as Europe's de

facto main cable exhibition becomes

increasingly international.

While the conference agenda is not

as rich or diverse as that of the Cable

Congress, it covered some of the same

ground as operators grapple with DOCSIS

3.0 and triple play as the battle with

satellite, digital terrestrial (DTT) and IPTV

telcos intensifies.

On the local front, Kabel Deutschland

(KDG), Germany's largest cable company

with over nine million subscribers, has

deployed packet voice switches from Cedar

Point Communications to provide VoIP and

support its migration to PacketCable 2.0

(a technology that CSI will be covering

in some detail early next year as early

deployments ramp up).

Much of KDG's network is digitised but

the vast majority of its customers - some

eight million - are still analogue, reflecting

the German market as a whole. Although

one of Europe's largest, Germany still lags

behind many other European markets in

terms of advanced services such as digital

television and PVR.

Signs are this is slowly changing, with

Kabel BW, which has 2.3m subs, set to

deploy PVR and VoD using gear from NDS

and Harmonic. The VoD service is slated for

launch in late 2009 and will be the

country's first major cable VoD deployment.

Below, we pick out some of the

highlights from our talk on the show floor.

Televes

A Spanish-based company with offices

in France, Italy, the UK, Germany, Middle

East and Portugal that is now increasing

its international focus, including Russia

and Central Europe. While Televes expects

15% of revenues to come from

international markets this year, it expects

this to grow from 25% to 50% by 2012,

according to Sergio Martin, the company's

communications manager. It designs and

develops a range of products from set-top

boxes and antennas, through to headends,

amplifiers, splitters and repeaters.

Televes used ANGA to give out two clear

messages: firstly, that HDTV is the

company's primary technology vision. With

the DSO coming across Europe in 2012,

it believes DTT is where HD will mainly take

place and consequently all its products are

with that purpose in mind. Secondly, Televes

is trying to position itself differently in the

market by having the entire design,

development and manufacturing process all

done in-house in Santiago, Spain.

“European technology made in Europe”

is the company's slogan.

The flagship announcement at the show

was the DAT HD antenna, which uses the

company's proprietary BOSS (balanced

output signal system) technology that

enables the output signal level to be

regulated automatically. It has been

developed specifically with the transition to

digital in mind, and Martin claims it repels

echoes - digital signals' biggest enemy -

better than other products in the field.

Martin has high hopes, believing it will be

the company's star product in the next five

year that will bring in “huge revenues”.

AppearTV

Appear TV launched an audio levelling

module that allows the operator to

individually adjust the audio level of each

channel, without consumers having to reach

for the remote control to adjust the volume

after every channel change. It does this by

analysing audio packets in the MPEG

transport stream (TS) which contain

packets that control the volume. Each

module, which sits inside the headend, has

a capacity of up to 250 channels. Appear

TV's own headends can take more than of

these modules.

The problem of inconsistent audio levels

is an issue because there is no standard in

Europe, according to CEO Carl-Walter Holst.

Aurora

MSO want to exploit the infrastructure they

have, not “rip and replace”. With this in

mind, Aurora launched the MC2000 optical

node platform and has been deploying

fibre-deep products since 2002, which it

sees as a cost effective way of meeting

ANGA Cable show ends on a high

Best in show

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Cable & Satellite International july-august 2009 www.csimagazine.com page twenty nine

Show review

bandwidth requirements. The MC2000

is optimised for the European market

and has ports at the bottom, for example.

It lends itself to the MDU market that is

prevalent in Europe and Asia, as well as

RFoG - indeed, turning it into an RFoG hub

is the product's “natural conclusion”,

according to Aurora's marketing director,

Dawn Emms. While all-IP is the future, there

is a lot of life left in HFC networks and

there is no need for this approach as yet,

said Emms.

ActiveVideo/Avinity

ActiveVideo Networks (formerly ICTV) used

the show to announce its acquisition of

Avinity Systems, based in The Netherlands,

as it looks to make greater inroads into the

European market. Both companies use so-

called “cloud-based” interactive TV

platforms and applications.

ActiveVideo's European operations will be

relocated to Avinity's headquarters in

Hilversum, near Amsterdam, meaning that

its small UK office will be shut down.

ActiveVideo counts Tele2 as one customer

in Europe.

The company expects to be in 5m homes

worldwide by year-end 2009, although

predominantly still in the US, where there is

lot of pre-deployment activity taking place.

This activity proves the system can scale,

and the company can prove this through its

larger US deployments, said Avinity's CEO

Ronald Brockmann, who will become the

merged company's MD for Europe.

Jungo

The US, the biggest MSO market, is

dominated by Motorola and Cisco. That

relationship defines the cable gateway

industry, according to Eran Rom, CEO of

Jungo, a supplier of gateway middleware.

CableLabs, which is trying to control and

define specifications, is impacted by the two

vendors in particular, he said.

As telcos become more sophisticated, so

cable is fighting back, and part of this

strategy is the gateway. The next step is

incorporating video/IPTV functionality, with

the converged gateway, which will take care

of the entire home network, the level after

that. Whether this will be the “super

gateway” or the “super STB” depends on

where you sit.

Jungo has traditionally been stronger in

the telco market but recently won a deal

with ZON TVCabo for its OpenRG

residential gateway middleware. ZON will

deploy the first real DOCSIS 3.0 gateway

based on Jungo's solution and Rom expects

this to be a logical evolution of the gateway

and the first of many such products given

that MSOs are all going the 3.0 route. He

therefore expects similar deals with both

European and US operators, as operators

look to exert more control of the gateway.

Normally, the middleware component is

supplied by the cable modem maker, but

this model enables the MSO to separate the

software from the base hardware and

transfer it to equipment made by other

DOCSIS vendors.

RGB

RGB Networks has upgraded its Broadcast

Network Processor (BNP), the company's

flagship product, to support several

advanced capabilities including support for

the MPEG-4/H.264 video format, as well as

the addition of digital Emergency Alert

System (EAS) capabilities.

The company also introduced its Dynamic

Bandwidth Manager (DBM) to European

cable operators, enabling them to expand

their VoD offerings leveraging existing QAM

and fibre infrastructure. Operators can

deliver up to 50% more VoD programming

within existing bandwidth through advanced

transrating technology.

Verivue

CSI also caught up with Verivue, a start-up

formed in late 2006 by Boston-based

entrepreneur Jim Dolce. Of the 90 people

employed by the company, 78 are

engineers. It believes everything will go

unicast and envisions cable/TV and internet

video converging and as such targets

everyone from cable to telcos and internet

TV and broadband players.

The company's flagship product is the

MDX 9000 Series Media Distribution

Switch, a carrier-class, network-centric,

Flash-based video platform. Based on the

modular, blade concept, the MDX 9000

chassis can operate in the range of

20Gbps to 200Gbps, and provide between

2TB and 24TB of storage.

Verivue has raised some $65 million so

far and is funded by the likes of Comcast

and Arris, which is also acting as a re-seller

of the MDX 9000 to MSOs.

ANGA returns next year in Cologne at the

earlier date of 4-6 May.

CSI

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