Alcatel-Lucent, Concurrent combine forces on expanding VOD catalogs

Alcatel-Lucent and Concurrent have teamed up to help cable operators quickly expand their VOD catalogs to various devices.

The expanded VOD offerings can be delivered to traditional set-top boxes, as well as tablets, PCs and smartphones, using Alcatel-Lucent’s Velocix CDN technology and Concurrent’s MediaHawk Unified Origin and TV-VOD edge servers. The new TV Everywhere architecture has been put through its paces via a trial with a large cable MSO.

“Cable MSOs are challenged with increasing the breadth of their video-on-demand catalogs as a way to improve their competitiveness in the marketplace,” said James Brickmeier, senior vice president of strategic marketing at Concurrent. “With Alcatel-Lucent, we have developed an architecture, which allows cable operators to cost-effectively expand their catalogs to hundreds of thousands of content hours. Our joint offering enables cable operators to make this content available to customers with traditional set-top boxes, while avoiding additional investments in localized content storage arrays. Instead, they can leverage the multi-screen CDN infrastructure they are building already to access regionalized or national content storage archives.”

The joint offering integrates the companies’ CDN and edge streaming solutions using standardized interfaces. Alcatel-Lucent and Concurrent said they have been jointly promoting adoption of an open-standards approach to cross-service interconnection by implementing the “C2” interface, which is part of the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions IPTV Interoperability Forum (ATIS IIF).

The multi-screen joint offering is being demonstrated at IBC2012 this week in Amsterdam.