Bigband Takes Vod 'Edge'

Cable World, Dec 2, 2002

Seth Kenvin may have lost his Upper East Side honk somewhere in the hills of Fremont, Calif., but he's a New Yorker through and through. BigBand Networks' VP of corporate development, is debriefing Cable World on his company's latest product rollout, VOD Edge, and he's speaking so quickly the tape recorder can barely keep up with him.

"With the launch of VOD Edge, we're incorporating QAM modulation right in the BMR," Kenvin says. In other words, the product integrates quadrature amplitude modulation - a fancy term for combining two amplitude-modulated (AM) signals into a single channel, which thereby doubles the effective bandwidth - with BigBand's Broadband Multimedia-Service Router (BMR).

A principal benefit of putting QAM on the same platform as the switched video router is that MSOs can reduce the number of boxes, and the cabling associated with them, in its VOD system. "The operators are trying to streamline their networks, and this is a huge step forward in that effort," Kenvin says.

VOD Edge can support all on-demand business models, including movies-on-demand (MOD), subscription video-on-demand (SVOD), network personal video recording (NPVR) and long form advertising (LFA), and is interoperable with all leading server vendors.

"There's no dictated singular architecture at work here, so its a totally agnostic approach," Kenvin says. "The ops will have complete flexibility, and won't be concerned about outgrowing the product or having to make huge investments down the road."

BigBand now serves around 3 million digital cable subs, almost 20% of the nationwide total.