• Arris extends supply deal with NCTC
By Brian Santo

Arris said it extended its relationship with the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC) to supply NCTC MSO members with end-to-end broadband access solution components.

Arris will also be the exclusive supplier, through the NCTC, of select customer premises E-MTA equipment.

"We are pleased to announce this new purchase agreement with Arris," said Richard Frey, NCTC vice president and general manager of hardware. "Our membership has a long history of successfully deploying Arris solutions in their systems, and this new agreement will offer them competitive pricing and Arris' highly regarded after-sales support to better plan any upgrades or greenfield network extensions."

• Bell TV partook of 3-D Masters
By Brian Santo

Bell Canada was a late addition to the roster of companies showing the Masters tournament in 3-D. Bell TV is delivered by satellite.

Bell claimed to have been Canada's first TV provider to offer 3-D HD television on a national basis with the broadcast.

Shaw broadcast the Masters in 3-D in Canada, too, but Shaw doesn’t have a national footprint.

• Grass Valley enables Dutch 3-D broadcast
By Brian Santo

Who needs Tiger Woods when you’ve got the Buma Harpen Gala? The first broadcast of 3-D in The Netherlands – of the country’s annual national music awards show – was enabled by DutchView, Grass Valley and 3D Village. DutchView used their Grass Valley LDK 8000 Elite WorldCam cameras to produce both the 2-D and 3-D program content.

Grass Valley supplied their specially developed 3-D Operational Control Panel (OCP) application, which allowed DutchView to use their regular cameras and infrastructure to produce 3-D. The resulting 3-D video can be viewed with the classic red/blue-lens glasses. For the 3-D production of the Harpen Gala, both a mirror-rig and a side-by-side rig were used.

“In a mirror-rig configuration, it is necessary to horizontally flip the image of the vertically mounted camera,” said Ronny van Geel, director of product management for Grass Valley. “The unique advantage of the LDK 8000 series is that this horizontal flipping can be done inside the camera itself, which eliminates the use of additional equipment and the risk of timing issues. And timing is essential in 3-D: a single frame difference will destroy the magic of 3-D instantaneously.”