INTERACTIVE TELEVISION COMPANIES LAUNCH ETG GROUP

COMBINING the strength of their expertise and experience, five of the leading worldwide interactive television (iTV) companies have launched the Entertainment Technology Group (ETG).
The ETG have developed one of the most advanced end-to-end broadband digital television solutions available on the market today.
Lucent Digital Video (LDV), nCUBE, NDS Group, Orca Interactive, and Pace Micro Technology integrated their complementary advanced technologies to form a complete end-to-end iTVsystem.
Demonstrated on each of the partners’ stands at IBC, the ETG system will enable broadband cable and telecommunication operators worldwide to reduce their time to market and maximize their ability to exploit the revenue potential of broadband technology.
The ETG solution supports on-demand entertainment applications such as traditional broadcast video, video-on-demand (VOD), television time shifting and personal video recorder (PVR) functionality with encryption-based content protection. The ETG will focus on providing solutions that enable conditional access and content protection, and utilise video servers and interactive programming guide (IPG) features for both live digital television and archived VOD services.
Each of the five vendors contributes industry-leading iTV solutions to the alliance. Lucent Digital Video provides the encoding technology through their line of MPEG-2 encoders, LINKRunner video gateways and network management software. nCUBE supplies their n4 streaming media appliance which offers VOD and network PVR functionality, and nABLE software, a robust interactive management platform for multiple networks.
For encryption, security and client-side PVR applications, NDS provides Open VideoGuardTM content protection software, and their XTVTM integrated personal TV solution. Orca offers broadcast and VOD applications, using their RiGHTvTM Core system. Pace Micro Technology will provide advanced digital set-top box, home gateway technology for all broadband platforms – cable, wireless and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV).
The ETG offers cable and telecom operators the leading architecture available today that supports both network and client-side PVR. Network PVR utilises a video server placed at an operator’s headend to store time-shifted television programming and enable PVR functionality, while client-side PVR places the storage and PVR functionality in the set-top box with a hard disk drive.
By combining network and client-side PVR, the ETG allows an operator to maximise available bandwidth and minimise network traffic by storing content in the set-top box while ensuring that the most popular broadcast content is stored at the video server. The flexibility of the solution gives the operator the power to choose whether to deploy either network or client-side PVR, or a combination of both without expensive reconfiguration of the architecture. (CD)