Numericable is adopting Cisco’s Content Delivery System (CDS) as it continues to evolve its network in France to handle both subscriber growth and an expansion of video services and features.

The service provider said the scalability of the Cisco CDS will help ensure that it can increase its video delivery capacity while optimizing networking costs and maintaining a consistent quality of experience for its 3.5 million TV customers and 1 million Internet customers.

Numericable is migrating to Cisco’s CDS in conjunction with Quative’s service delivery platform (SDP) . Numericable is calling the architecture a “medianet.” Quative is a member of the Kudelski Group, which also includes Nagravision, another Numericable vendor.

On its Web site, Quative explains that its SDP is used to help scale IPTV video-on-demand (VOD) deployments.

In smaller cable networks, Quative explains, it can be possible to run the IP VOD traffic within the DOCSIS network, as Numericable had been doing, using Cisco DOCSIS 3.0 equipment and Cisco QAMs.

In larger cable networks, this architecture would not scale, and therefore the fiber backbone of the cable networks would possibly need to be extended in order to have QAM capacity/channels available for VOD traffic to run on DVB-C, Quative explains.

The Quative SDP platform supports a session resource manager, which brokers between an on-demand IP video server connection and a free QAM port on a case-by-case basis. VOD traffic can be diverted from the limited DOCSIS IP network capacity out band into the DVB-C network and keep the low-bandwidth VOD control traffic (e.g., RTSP for trick play), VOD catalog data download and application traffic, such as VOD purchase transactions in band within the DOCSIS network, Quative said.

By combining the Cisco CDS with Quative's SDP, Numericable says it can offer its customers advanced video services, including catch-up TV services, access to a catalogue of more than 7,000 programs and movies, high-definition videos on-demand and NumeriSpace, a service for user-generated content (UGC).

Numericable's NumeriSpace service brings media sharing and social networking to both the Web and the TV, using Cisco CDS integrated with applications from Eyeka and supported by the Quative SDP. Numericable launched NumeriSpace in December, where subscribers can share, view and manipulate high-quality UGC photos and videos (uploaded on their computers) from their TVs via the set-top box.

The Cisco Advanced Services team designed, implemented and integrated the Numericable CDS solution, including third-party applications. Cisco’s CDS operates on the Cisco Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) architecture and incorporates medianet technologies for delivering video to digital televisions and set-top boxes, as well as distributing video, voice, music and data to a wide range of IP-enabled consumer devices such as personal computers and mobile phones.