Diva/Sarnoff's VOD, "OnSet". Just put this box on top of your Divx DVD player, cable/satellite box, and webTV box. If you still have a VCR, your going to need to move it..............................
multichannel.com
Valley Co. Perks Up VOD Market
By LESLIE ELLIS
A quiet Silicon Valley company called Diva Systems Inc. emerged last week with a digital solution attractive enough to breathe new life into video-on-demand.
Last week, Diva, a clandestine Silicon Valley start-up that is already two years old, came out of the closet with a turnkey VOD system called "OnSet," which is already operating in Suburban Cable's Philadelphia-area system.
Adelphia Communications Corp., Cablevision Systems Corp., Rifkin & Associates Inc. and six other, undisclosed MSOs representing a combined 11.6 million homes are also soon to be takers, reasoning that Diva's combined business, content and technology plan meets their needs.
"The difference between Diva and the other video-on-demand technologies is that Diva makes sense for an operator," said Joe DeJulio, vice president of network services for Suburban. "It's a true digital server, controlling a true bit stream, in real time."
Saying that the system is was doing a slow, controlled launch, DeJulio added, "The ones who have it are extremely excited," but he declined to say how many are subscribing.
Diva is funded by over $100 million in private equity and staffed by a widely respected group of employees -- many formerly with Viacom Cable, and others from Home Box Office and other industry segments.
"That's one of the factors that impressed us -- a very impressive personnel list," said Pete Smith, vice president of engineering for Rifkin, who added, "No lightweights there."
VOD services, which were widely tested in 1994 and 1995, trickled out of the mainstream last year because of high equipment costs and the enveloping presence of the Internet as the next means of television interactivity.
But in the interim, disk-storage-space prices dropped sharply, making Diva's persistence at developing its complete package seem timely, analysts said.
Suburban started connecting employees in Delaware County to the OnSet service in June, and it moved to a "controlled launch" last month, said DeJulio. Next year, Suburban will extend the launch to its Harrisburg, Pa., and Wilmington, Del., systems.
In the initial phase of the rollout, OnSet provides "instant access" to hundreds of new Hollywood titles, as well as classics and a package of children's and family programs, with VCR functionality like fast-forward, pause and rewind.
Already, Diva's licensing arrangements include more than 2,000 new movie releases and other titles from 20 movie studies, among them Warner Bros. (including New Line Cinema and Turner Pictures), Walt Disney Studios, Columbia/TriStar, Universal Studios, HBO, Public Broadcasting Service and Children's Television Workshop, executives said last week.
Suburban's customers who take the OnSet service pay a monthly service fee of $5.95, then $3.95 per new-release film and lesser amounts for older movies and children's content, executives said.
Dan Liberatore, vice president of engineering for Adelphia, confirmed a trial for next year in its Lansdale, Pa., system.
Smith also confirmed a plan to put Diva's OnSet in one or more of Rifkin's systems next year.
"It's very functional and easy to use, and I think that there are some real incredible packaging opportunities," said Smith. "It certainly appears that they've got all of the pieces of the puzzle."
Those puzzle pieces include a scaleable video server, which was initially developed by Sarnoff Research Inc. to simultaneously test several RCA TV sets. It holds 1,000 films that can be streamed out eight at a time into a 6-megahertz channel, using 64-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation), said Del Heller, vice president of systems integration for Diva.
With a digital-video-multiplexing ratio of 8-to-1, as few as two 6-MHz channels offer up to 1,000 titles over a cable system designed to serve 500 homes per node, Heller said.
In the home, a Sarnoff/Diva digital set-top decodes the incoming bit stream and passes it off to the television set. Diva contracted Jabil Circuit Inc., a large consumer-electronics manufacturer, to build the set-tops.
And although Diva executives said they're not interested in manufacturing set-tops in the long run, the current situation means that subscribers already receiving scrambled premium channels will need a second set-top if they take the OnSet service.
"It's a bit of a problem, sure," said Smith. "But I've been assured that [Diva] will shift the technology into other [vendors'] set-tops."
Diva will also have to figure out how it fits into the OpenCable digital set-top developments, MSO executives said.
Because the system is configured as a turnkey -- meaning that Diva provides, maintains and owns all key technology pieces -- operators that use OnSet need only to find headend space for four cabinets, plus dedicate up to four 6-MHz channels of bandwidth to the on-demand service, Heller said.
The total amount of dedicated bandwidth depends on penetration and buy- rates, as well as on overall system architecture, he said.
Paul Cook, chairman and CEO of Diva, said last week that Diva's business plan will work because each carriage agreement spans seven years, "which guarantees us a revenue stream that covers the capital costs.
"We're going after the midsized and small systems first, and we believe that we can be successful at 1 million subscribers," Cook said. |
