Recent Events

OCAP/ETV Interop, October 8-12, 2007, CableLabs, Louisville, CO We plan to attend the next OCAP/ETV Interop at CableLabs. Our focus will be to continue testing DSG delivery of XAITs to a number of available OCAP receivers. We also expect to test ETV ad creation and insertion.

IBC, September 9-13, 2005, Amsterdam, The Netherlands UniSoft attended IBC, located for some of the time, on Strategy & Technology Limited's stand, number 1:465.

CableLabs Summer Conference, August 14-17, 2005, Keystone, Colorado

The Summer Conference was once again well attended. This year's event included demonstrations on ETV (enhanced TV), and UniSoft was found in this section of the vendor area. On show was the latest version of TSBroadcaster unique in that it was, to our knowledge, the first single encoder capable of building and streaming simultaneously both OCAP and ETV transport streams. The system was configured with two ASI outputs and 3 executions of TSPlayer (OCAP, Common Download and ETV).

We showed a wide variety of OCAP applications running on the ADB iCAN 3200 series box and a number of early ETV applications running on a Motorola DCT 2000.

Photo to the left: our pals from ADB, Bill Leuhrs and Przemek Sergiel.

National Association of Broadcasters, April 16-21, 2005, Las Vegas, Nevada
Present on the DVB stand again this year, we showed TSBroadcaster playing out a number of OCAP applications, most notably digital teletext from SysMedia and the JAME authoring system from Fraunhofer.

NCTA, April 3-5, 2005, San Francisco, California
UniSoft and Strategy and Technology (S&T) participated in the CableNET exhibit at NCTA. On show was the latest version of the TSBroadcaster OCAP encoder which includes Out-of-Band object carousel generation and Common Download support.

Starz OCAP Uplink, November 1, 2004, Englewood, Colorado

The first satellite transmission of a bound OCAP application to the cable headed was successfully completed from Starz's headquarters in Englewood, Colorado.

The OCAP application was played-out by TSBroadcaster, the ASI output being muxed with live video content at Starz's facility, and uplinked to satellite. Both Starz and CableLabs were able to receive the application using a Motorola DSR4400MD receiver. The DHEI output at a bitrate of 26.97 Mbps was converted to ASI and passed to QAM64 modulators. The application was shown running on ADB set-top-boxes with Osmosys OCAP. At CableLabs the application was passed to an Scientific-Atlanta DNCS headend for RF distribution to the Interop Lab.

The application was authored by SysMedia, using their Plasma Magneta content management software, and Fraunhofer, using their JAME iTV production system.

The Starz application allowed simple navigation between a variety of informative textual pages which described "What's On Tonight", "Saturday Premieres" and "Movie Extras".

IBC, September 10-15, 2004, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The MHP, MHEG and OCAP versions of TSBroadcaster, were on display at Strategy and Technology's (S&T) stand 220 in Hall 1. Also of interest were the products being offered by Digital Television Software Limited (DTS), which is a joint venture betweed Eldon Technology Limited and S&T. DTS offers an MHEG-5 engine for use in the UK Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) market.

Attendence at IBC was up 14% this year to around 40,000 attendees, which was encouraging.

The National Show, May 2-5, 2004, New Orleans

The demonstrations provided at NAB (see below) were shown on the CableNET booth at NCTA. A multi-service OCAP transport stream, containing 8 TV channels, with a total of 6 OCAP applications, was played out to five individual pedistals: ADB, DigiSoft, Espial, Osmosys and S&T/UniSoft.

The OCAP applications were broadcast in 3 object carousels which were allocated a total of 11 Mbps bandwidth. In addition to the applications from DigiSoft, Espial and SysMedia, we were also showing applications which demonstrated just-in-time Stream Events and the Manage Updates feature of TSBroadcaster. Manage Updates allows TSBroadcaster to associate a file in the object carousel with an equivalent pointed to by a URL. If the file changes, TSBroadcaster re-encodes the update into the object carousel and broadcasts it.

National Association of Broadcasters, April 19-22, 2004, Las Vegas

Located on the DVB stand, we demonstrated a number of advanced OCAP applications being transmitted to OCAP receivers. Partnering with DigiSoft, Fraunhofer IMK, Osmosys, Strategy and Technology and Sysmedia, the demo system consisted of: DigiSoft's DigiHost headend application management platform, supporting the DigiTravel and DigiHealth applications. SysMedia's content management system, PLASMA MAGENTA, producing live digital teletext. Fraunhofer JAME application server, being fed by PLASMA MAGENTA, and producing a highly optimised version of the teletext application. Encoding and play-out of all the OCAP applications being managed by TSBroadcaster running on TSPlayer system. Osmosys OCAP middleware running on an ADB receiver. Connection of these products: view the block diagram.

Photograph above: David Cutts and Nick Birch from S&T.

Western Show, December 2-5, 2003, Anaheim Convention Center

UniSoft participated in CableNET 03 at the Western. On show was TSBroadcaster running on a TSPlayer system playing a four channel OCAP transport stream to an ADB set-top-box running Osmosys OCAP. The TSPlayer system was outputting ASI to a Scientific Atlanta QAM modulator with an RF connection to the ADB box.

A number of sample OCAP applications were being demonstrated running on the ADB system, including a news application provided by DigiSoft. The demo video content was provided by Starz Encore.

TSBroadcaster uses the SoftOC core encoding technology which is also being used by CableLabs as an integral component of the OCAP Automatic Test Environment (ATE). The TSBroadcaster and TSPlayer combination are well suited for integration into existing digital cable headends for deployment of OCAP services.

UniSoft anticipates OCAP services will be available during the course of 2004.

IBC, September 12-16, 2003, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

IBC 2003 attendance was up 6% from the previous year, and whilst the halls weren't completely packed, most people with which we spoke were pleased with the show and its exhibits. We spent a lot of the time on the Strategy and Technology Limited (S&T) stand, number 5.313, located in Hall 5. S&T provided many excellent demonstrations of:

Photograph to the left, Ian Medland of S&T, in between demos and probably in need of a beer.

NCTA, June 8-11, 2003, Chicago, Illinois

At NCTA 2003 UniSoft provided a series of demonstrations in the ITV Alliance Showroom (located s405b). The ITV Alliance events where sponsored by Sun Microsystems, Buzztime and Schematic.

Using Sun's prototype OCAP headend system, UniSoft demonstrated a variety of interactive MHP applications, including a VOD application from Sun, a suite of applications, including an application launcher and EPG, from Sofia Digital and an EPG from Gist. TSBroadcaster handled the encoding and play-out of all applications and content. The MHP/OCAP development environment, TSDeveloper, was also shown upon request.

TSBroadcaster is suitable for both MSOs and Cable Networks. Installed on Sun's OCAP platform, the system will integrate into existing digital cable head ends, allowing MSOs to create and play OCAP transport streams. Similarily, the software can be used at a Cable Network's uplink facility for adding bound OCAP applications to content.

Photograph to the right, UniSoft's Audrey Ruelas showing the "Hello Bern" application.

NAB2003, April 7-10, 2003, Las Vegas, Nevada

UniSoft and S&T attended NAB2003, and were present on the DVB booth, stand SU 6207, located in LVCC South Hall Second Floor. We provided numerous demonstrations of TSBroadcaster, which is a new headend product which we have just released. This software performs automatic and scheduled encoding and play out of OCAP or MHP content from a head end or broadcast network. It manages creation and definition of transport streams, real time updates to application data, multiple transport stream play out and bandwidth allocation.

Our MHP development environment, TSDeveloper, was also running as part of our exhibit. The OCAP version of TSDeveloper will be available within the next 1-2 months.

CES, January 9-12, 2003, Las Vegas, Nevada

2003 International CES was reasonably crowded this year, apparently the largest in the history of the show.

Of course our main focus at CES was with the consumer electronic manufacturers who are, or will, produce MHP and/or OCAP receivers. We were a little early for OCAP recievers, but it is widely rumoured that there will be at least one implementation available for beta testing by April 2003.

We were interested to notice the large number of HDTV displays, available from many credible sources, some in smaller sizes as well as the traditional large size. This is a good sign that HDTV is becoming aforedable, and will become widely adopted over the next 2-3 years. This being the case, perhaps OCAP services will be bundled by some MSOs with a number of HD services. If such was the case, the business model for OCAP interactive programming would greatly benefit from it.

Photograph to the right: the huge Panasonic stand, very impressive and an interesting cable TV solution.

OCAP Interop, July 22-25, 2002, at CableLabs, Louisville, CO

Hosted by CableLabs, the OCAP Interoperability Workshops are targetted at providing an environment where OCAP developers can test their middleware implementations, applications, authoring tools and play out systems. In addition to which, information exchange conerning interoperability of each component of the delivery chain is considered highly valuable.

This event was attended by mostly software companies and consumer electronics manufacturers. The Interop was styled around MHP Interops which are held quite frequently at IRT in Munich.

Both UniSoft and S&T took part in this event, using the TSDeveloper product to broadcast a variety of MHP content. The Scientific Atlanta modulator used by UniSoft was connected into CableLabs standard lab distribution system which allowed participants to tune into the services broadcast by UniSoft (and other participants with play out systems) for such testing purposes.

UniSoft spent some of the time at the interop experimenting with its signing tool for MHP applications, UniSoft MHP SFG. This tool generates the appropriate hash, signature and certificate files for authenticated MHP and OCAP applications, as per Chapter 12 of the MHP specification.

Photo to the left: Nick Birch from S&T making some tweaks to the TSDeveloper play-out software.

NCTA, May 5-8, 2002, New Orleans

UniSoft attended the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) Cable 2002 show, held in New Orleans.

Attendence this year was noticeably down although a lot of interest in areas such as Video on Demand, HDTV and interactive content. Next year, we expect OCAP to be a key topic as the standard mutures and set top box manufacturers and MSOs implement deployment plans. In addition, some savy MSOs are planning on building the client side of their VOD solution as an OCAP application.

Located at the Sun Microsystems executive suite, ES-16, in Hall A, UniSoft made numerous demonstrations of the TSDeveloper product in combination with Sun's Forte integrated development environment (IDE) for Java and Snap2's Gear product (templates for generation of MHP Xlets).

The TSDeveloper server, running on a Sun Blade 100, streamed out four complete TV services encoded into a single transport stream via an ASI card provided by Video Propulsion, Inc. This served as input to a DVB-S modulator from Radyne ComStream, Inc., through to an upconverter (taking 70MHz up to 1270MHz) and out to a Philips MHP "Silverbox".

NAB2002, April 8-11, 2002, Las Vegas

Attendance at this year's NAB was higher than we had anticipated, although apparently 8% lower than last year.

UniSoft spent much of time this year working with Strategy and Technology, demonstrating the S&T MHP broadcast and authoring tools on the DVB stand, located in the South Hall of LVCC.

In particular, the TSDeveloper product provides a very convenient way to author MHP applications, and rapidly broadcast to an MHP box for test and development purposes. A number of the other exhibitors on the stand were using the TSDeveloper client side to encode their applications into a DSM-CC object carousel, generate a DVB transport stream and play out using a single TSDeveloper server. Photograph to the right - Chris Wass of S&T ready for the next TSDeveloper demo.

There was considerable Interest in DVB activities at the show, and indeed the status of the MHP standard as it continues to propergate worldwide. Photo to the left - Nahid Khan of the DVB.

The OCAP Developers Conference, February 14, 2002

Hosted by CableLabs at the Westin Westminster Hotel, Colorado. This event had an impressive turn out, and included an number of very interesting presentations and demonstrations. Most products being shown where MHP implementations and tools, all suppliers making very positive statements about availability of OCAP software in the near future. It was encouraging to hear that the MSOs have made a firm endorsement of OCAP, indicating that OCAP products and subsequent deployment are becoming a reality.

Presentation to the ATV W3 Symposium, October 11/12, 2001

An introduction into the importance of conformance testing, certification and branding for worldwide iTV standards. Made at the University of Central Florida, Orlando.