Cut-Up: Terayon CherryPicker Splices Digital Ads

Cable World, April 10, 2000 by Jim Barthold

Terayon Communication Systems Inc. has introduced a way to splice digital ads into digital video streams, including statistically multiplexed streams using a revised version of its CherryPicker grooming technology.

It is, said Stephen King, SVP/GM of Terayon's digital video systems, a product that meets a need whose time has maybe not yet come but is close.

"It's one of those things that seems to be suddenly exponential," he said. "The world was quiet for a long time, and now everybody is suddenly interested."

MediaOne Group Inc. is the first MSO to trial the system, although "most of the MSOs in the U.S. have deployed CherryPickers" and are expected to move to this functionality as well, King said.

MediaOne, though, is a "unique" situation, said Gerry Anstine, engineering director for the Western region.

"Everything is scrambled here, so we had to find some way of delivering those services once we start putting digital boxes out," he explained. "Ad insertion is huge to this market."

The regional market, he said, includes eight zones, six headends and 340 channels of analog ad insertion.

"We did not want to deploy a digital box with an analog descrambler in it, which would be the only way to be able to deliver those services that are scrambled today," he added.

The most common use for digital ad insertion into digital streams is to insert digital spots into satellite-delivered MPEG streams.

"We're actually taking analog video and digitizing it ourselves locally," Anstine said.

King expects the more accepted practice of inserting digital ads into statistically multiplexed digital streams to take off as digital penetrations increase and operators reach for a piece of an annual ad sales pie estimated to be $4 billion.

"They can't afford to go back to baseband, decompress, insert and then recompress to do ad insertion," King explained.

nCUBE, Motorola Inc., BARCO plc, SeaChange International Inc. and Next Level Communications Inc. use the Terayon product with their ad insertion technologies, King said. The ad splicer extracts cue tone information from incoming digital ad streams, decrypts the information and passes it back through the ad server.

"The ad server is going to digest that and pass it back to the ad splicer for insertion," said David Brenner, Terayon's product marketing manager. "The actual control of scheduling is going to be managed by the ad insertion server. The determination is made by the server, and we are merely going to be reacting to their commands."

Those commands, he said, as well as the ad splicing technology itself, are part of a Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) standard that Terayon co-authored.

"This could be one of the reasons why people are getting more interested in local ad insertions, because there is a standard," King theorized. "You could have anybody's DPI-compliant (Digital Program Insertion) server there."

King pointed out that SeaChange, nCUBE, Motorola and BARCO will "be offering this product as part of their systems."

"We don't have an ad insertion system because we don't sell those other components," he added.

The ad splicer, King said, sells for about $25,000 and supports an entire digital multiplex. Upgrading an existing CherryPicker for ad splicing would cost about $7,000, but King said that's unlikely because most operators separate the grooming and ad insertion functions.

"The customers are pushing us toward this separate product concept. You can add this standards-based ad splicing to the groomer, but the customers have been asking for a separate product that doesn't groom, just does ad splicing, which is what this is," he said.