For those of you that haven't read
my thread in the News forum - or who have otherwise not heard about it - later this week Virgin Media and a Dutch company called
Avinity will be demonstrating Avinity's RenderCast platform, at Cable Congress 2009. It looks like it's best described as a thin client solution, in that all the work is done at the headend.
Talk of a next-generation TV platform has been flying around for some time, with the term cropping up in investor presentations and also in the leaked Samsung V+ document. However, this is (to my knowledge) the first time that VM has publicly linked itself with a possible provider of such a platform - up until now the only platform provider (again, as far as I know) that VM has dealt with was SeaChange International (who bought Liberate Technologies a few years back), since before the NTL:Telewest merger when Liberate TV Navigator wasn't looking quite so archaic.
What's interesting is that VM
may have worked with Avinity before,
see here, quote down there (my emphasis):
Quote:
Together with a Tier 1 cable operator we have been building a prototypeon top of a large VoD archive. It has been demonstrated successfully, and shows how the VoD navigation can become media rich.
This project started in December of 2007
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I'm not even going to pretend that I know what "Tier 1" means in this context (although I would think that maybe it simply means big and important, yes?), but VM are probably the only cable operator with a VoD library that could be described as large. So, VM and Avinity
could possibly have been working together - obviously in secret - for well over a year now.
Looking at their website, RenderCast as the NGTV platform seems like a rather good fit for VM. With all the older boxes out there, creaking under the strain of Liberate but prohibitively expensive for VM - in its current state, anyway - to replace, the thin client approach could be just what the doctor ordered.
Hopefully, somebody will leak a video because I'd very much like to see exactly what it is that VM and Avinity have to show off!
Sam