More fat to chew ....
VOD Providers Vie for Cable-Operator Deals
By BILL MARCHETTI June 14, 1999
The list of companies offering video-on-demand solutions to cable operators keeps growing, as Unisys Corp. became the latest to enter the VOD arena.
Besides Diva Systems Corp., which counts seven affiliated cable systems (see related story), the roster includes SeaChange International Inc., Concurrent Computer Corp., Intertainer Inc., TVN Entertainment Corp., Vivid Technology and nCUBE.
Unisys, with 33,000 employees in 100 countries, is sure to ruffle rivals' feathers by positioning itself as the deep-pocketed, big-name new kid on the VOD block.
Sizing up the competition, Unisys spokeswoman Kary Galloway said, "There are a lot of smaller companies in the marketplace, but their viability is a little bit questionable as far as whether they'll be able to continue and turn a profit. Also, we haven't seen yet from some of these companies how scaleable their systems are going to be."
She continued, "We have the financial backing and the resources, and we're situated to deliver a working product" in the fourth quarter of 1999.
"Unisys servers are running the whole NASDAQ stock market, and they have never crashed," she added. "They lend themselves very easily to VOD technology. Even our smallest server can handle 7,000 concurrent video streams. We have the capacity to go to hundreds of thousands."
SeaChange said its VOD server is scaleable to support headend or cable-hub installation. The six-year-old, publicly held firm has inked a memo of understanding with Time Warner Cable to provide servers and software for the MSO's digital boxes.
Time Warner also has an MOU with Concurrent, and it expects to shift into the VOD phase of its digital rollout in late 1999 or early 2000.
A VOD trailblazer via the December 1994 through September 1997 Full Service Network project in Orlando, Fla., Time Warner has partnered with SeaChange since early 1998 to provide movies-on-demand in hotels served by its New York systems.
Time Warner and Canada's Rogers Cablesystems Ltd. are testing the SeaChange system in preparation for residential VOD deployments. "We have six different commitments to do different deployments this year," SeaChange director of interactive technologies Yvette Gordon said.
Also a force in digital ad insertion and near-VOD, SeaChange provides MPEG-2 digital-video systems serving more than 20,000 TV channels to cable operators and broadcasters worldwide.
Staking its claim as a VOD player, Concurrent said in May that it's spending about $1 million per month on VOD research, development, sales and marketing.
In releasing financial results for the quarter ended March 31, Concurrent added that it is working with "several cable companies that are planning VOD trials to start … no later than the summertime," and it expects to generate "significant revenue from the residential cable market."
At the Western Show last December, Intertainer selected Concurrent's "MediaHawk" video server to deploy entertainment-on-demand applications to cable customers receiving the Intertainer service on their television sets.
Intertainer delivers on-demand programming to either TVs or personal computers using high-speed-data lines over cable or telephone connections.
Its strategic partners include Comcast Corp., U S West, Sony Corp., Intel Corp. and NBC. The three-year-old company is conducting VOD trials with U S West in the Denver market and with Comcast in the Philadelphia area.
In March, NVOD provider TVN signed the first affiliation agreement for its turnkey VOD programming and transactional service.
Strategic Technologies' 2,500-subscriber Valencia, Calif., cable system will initially use one analog channel to provide VOD, and it will eventually go to three channels as product offerings are expanded beyond current movie releases.
Customers are expected to start ordering VOD in June. TVN president Jim Ramo called the Valencia project "the first of a handful we're going to do in the next three to six months in order to test the whole system and marketing efforts."
The video server in Valencia, from Vivid, uses industrial PC-server hardware and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT operating system. Chalfont, Pa.-based Vivid described its VOD solution as "a fully integrated system including video streaming, interactive-application support, VOD set-top management and purchase tracking with billing-system interface."
"We have technical trials going on with three MSOs," Vivid CEO Fred Allegrezza said -- one of which is understood to be MediaOne Group Inc., which is being acquired by AT&T Corp.
Rounding out the list of VOD providers is the team of nCUBE and SkyConnect. The companies expect to conclude a final agreement for nCUBE's proposed purchase of SkyConnect later this month.
In announcing the deal in March, 16-year-old nCUBE asserted that the combined entity would be No. 1 worldwide in VOD, No. 1 in NVOD and No. 2 in digital ad insertion, boasting an installed base of video-server systems encompassing more than 21,000 broadcast-quality MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group) channels.
Most of the players have integrated, or are in the process of integrating, their VOD services with the digital platforms of leading cable set-top-box makers General Instrument Corp. and Scientific-Atlanta Inc.
|
