Virgin Extends Liberate contract until Jan 2011

[dsmuk]

Have just come across this and it talks about Virgin developing a new EPG for it's cable service and moving away from times to 'Zones' but that it is still 'several years away'

A glimpse of Virgin’s current thinking was seen at Furturesource’s Driving Digital Content in London this week. Kevin Baughan, director of technical strategy, showed a ‘proof of concept’ drawing in a variety of components to make up the TV experience.

“We’re moving away from programme guides and time, giving channels zones in which they can develop a relationship with the viewer.� Baughan showed stills of a guide where channels would have their own areas, directing viewers to linear, on demand and broadband content.

However, logistics and the existing receiver inventory mean that even if Baughan was to receive immediate approval for his plans it would still take several years before they were implemented.

http://www.broadbandtvnews.com/?p=19157

Gues that demo a few months ago was just that, a demo and once again I remember a poster saying...

Originally Posted by sammyjayuk

Still, I'm not sure that any of this will ever come to fruition - it's only a trade show, and this is still the same Virgin Media...

so who knows what will happen!

[ShadowTD]

Woo. Speccy graphics for another 10 years.

[popper]

the OP seems to have missed the real story here even though they used it in the title.

"
Virgin Media is to maintain its current Liberate middleware through until January 2011, following a new agreement with SeaChange International.

The decision follows recent comments by Virgin Media CEO Neil Berkett that the company was working on a new EPG that would combine on demand services with web-based content."

"SeaChange also confirmed a second Virgin contract extension, taking its Media Services VOD content processing agreement through until December 2011. Combined with significant business from US operators Comcast and Verizon it helped give the technology company revenues of $48.9 million (€34.48m). Net income of $1 million delivered SeaChange its seventh consecutive quarter of profitability"

that story being , the antiquated Liberate middleware and its backend are just not upto todays GUI expectations and has'nt been for many years.

its been clear for a very long time that all the in service STBs internal SOC (System On a Chip) CPU's are just not powerful enough to run this antiquated Liberate middleware anywere near effectively, not to mention liberate is well known to be a massive CPU cycles hog for even the very limited microscopic subset of the generic Html javacode it was designed to use....

ineffective core code and slow CPU's make for a very bad GUI and lockup experience as we all know using C&W/NTL/VM kit for any length of time.

as for the back end, that too is way to old, but VM once again go for the super cheap short term option, at the expense of a realtime current GUI and backend that could help sell more subsciptions long term...

rebol view could be had for a very good price and produce any No. of fancy "personal GUI's" outclassing anything on the world market today or in the near future, if Neil just took to time and talked to the Amiga lead OS guy and creator of rebol view Carl Sassenrath, CTO ,REBOL Technologies
http://www.rebol.net/cgi-bin/r3blog.r and ask him about it.

[nutellajunkie]

Originally Posted by ShadowTD

Woo. Speccy graphics for another 10 years.

so true hah!

[Horizon]

I would comment on the fact that we're stuck with this dreadful software for probably several more years as this crappy ancient EPG software is my biggest bug bear, but I won't comment as it's too depressing.

Oh hang on, I have just commented on it...

[sammyjayuk]

Meanwhile, in the land of those who finally gave up hope about 2 weeks ago, my Amstrad Sky+HD box ought to be getting Sky's new HD EPG soon. Fine, it doesn't involve any sort of paradigm shift like the Zones thing (probably) does, but it does introduce some new features, and although it was rather late it wasn't VM late, since (you may want to sit down for this bit...) it actually arrived*.

I certainly don't like being in a 12 month contract with a company like Sky, but VM have somewhat forced me into it. The lack of even a basic search feature is completely and utterly unforgiveable, and I wonder whether, by the time my 12 months is up, VM's guide will have changed one iota.

I don't really mind the graphics - they need to get the features sorted first!

Sam

*I'm going to cut VM a tiny bit of slack here by pointing out that they're a company with huge debts incurred by having to build a massive network while completing against the virtually monopolistic Sky whose network consists largely of thin air.