Service Electric Cablevision, a subsidiary of the 15th largest U.S. cable television operator, is readying to launch a digital simulcast platform based on BigBand Networks' BMR1200 router.

Service Electric plans to use Gigabit Ethernet networking in this deployment as an efficient transport platform for all content among three Pennsylvania systems, and as a foundation for additional functionality such as local advertising insertion and enhanced service reliability through headend redundancy.

The deployment plans are to connect multiple Service Electric systems, including two primary headend facilities. The BigBand BMR is designed to convert content to Gigabit Ethernet for transport, perform de-jittering to assure video quality after transport, and to detect availability and quality of content in order to automatically switch to an alternative source when necessary.

Also, Service Electric intends to consolidate digital ad servers and transport advertisements to edge-based BMRs that would perform splicing based on the SCTE 30 and SCTE 35 standards. Because digital simulcasting is designed to encode analog content at headends and decode at network edges, the redundant Gigabit Ethernet transport and digital ad insertion functionality could be extended to all programming carried by Service Electric, the companies said.