In an effort to help North American small and mid-sized cable operators migrate to all digital, Evolution Broadband has formed Evolution Digital.

“We received a great deal of encouragement and support at the recent NCTC Winter Conference and are convinced our Open Standard digital solution will benefit Independent Operators throughout North America,” said Brent Smith, president of the new division.

“The industry is ready to break the duopoly that exists in the current market, which prohibits operators from taking advantage of bandwidth saving technologies such as MPEG-4 compression, and inhibits innovation and cost reduction of set-tops. By incorporating elements of the DVB World Standard into our Open Cable and CableCard system platform, we are able to blow the doors wide open to internationally recognized set-top and consumer electronics manufacturers.”

The system includes a turnkey headend process to encrypt digital signals in any format, including MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and 8 VSB, to a QAM modulated output. The conditional access system is provided by Conax, while a variety of set-top box manufacturers will provide boxes that support OCAP and CableCards.

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