BigBand VOD: Enhance Revenues and Increase Competitiveness

Video on demand enables an operator to enhance revenues and increase competitiveness. The BigBand Networks VOD (Video on Demand) platform leverages the strengths of the BigBand BEQ™ Edge QAM platform to deliver the following capabilities:

• Flexible and economical edge processing of switched content, which significantly lowers the total cost of ownership
• Support for the full range of VOD services, including MOD (movies on demand), SVOD (subscription video on demand), free-on-demand, networked PVR and long form advertising in either SD or HD format
• Space efficient termination of 48 or to 96 QAM channels in a 1.5 RU chassis that enables hundreds of concurrent VOD streams
• Modular platform holding up to six hot-swappable QAM/RF output cards, allowing capacity to be incrementally scaled as the subscriber base and VOD library expands
• Upconversion granularity of 4:1 or 8:1 supports any size service group and overcomes limits imposed by non-contiguous spectrum availability
• SNMP management provides local and remote communications between platforms and supports different VOD server topologies
• Economical GigE IP distribution of digital programming from headend to hub locations, with DWDM and CWDM options available
• Fully compatible with pre-encryption and session-based bulk encryptors to protect valuable VOD content

BigBand VOD provides the operator with the freedom to choose an optimal network topology. In some scenarios a centralized server topology will provide the best returns; in some a distributed topology will be more suitable; and in others a hybrid of the two may be preferable. BigBand’s VOD platform supports any server topology without major changes to the network configuration or other major capital expenditures. SNMP provides seamless communication between BEQ platforms, enabling auto-discovery of both QAM cards and network topology, shortening time-to-revenue. A user-friendly GUI (Graphical User Interface) facilitates configuration of large networks—scaling to hundreds of BEQ chasses—allowing an operator to manage multiple locations cost effectively from a single site. Fully interoperable with all major servers, the platform sources content locally and remotely in the same unit.

BigBand VOD includes a variety of features to support high service reliability and content protection. In the core, diverse fiber routing, with a 50 ms or faster failover, ensures high network availability. At the edge, the BigBand BEQ features service-level fault detection and protection switching with 2+2 redundant GigE ports accomplishing rapid switchover when a network event occurs. Maximum resiliency can also be achieved by striping service groups across the platform. Pre-encryption and session-based encryption via bulk encryptors ensure content security, which is particularly crucial for the most highly valued VOD content, such as first-run movies. Subscriber billing information is likewise protected.

The versatile BigBand BEQ chassis is also designed for universal support of switched digital video, broadcast video and VOD. Use of an advanced ERM (Edge Resource Manager) allows each narrowcast service group to be independently configured, eliminating the need to factor in overhead for each service’s “worst case” service group utilization bandwidth assignments. The platform also extends the VOD concept of personalized session allocation to live programming by leveraging the advanced capabilities of the BigBand SDV Server.

BigBand VOD supports centralized and distributed processing of VOD content