S&T's TSDeveloper is a multi-user OCAP and ETV development platform similar to TSBroadcaster but designed to be more suitable for the content authoring community. TSDeveloper builds and plays-out an MPEG-2 transport stream containing four in-band services. Each service may have an OCAP or ETV application signaled to it.

TSDeveloper is packaged on a desktop PC so is particularly suitable for application authoring and development environments.

For OCAP, one fixed bit rate DSM-CC object carousel is allocated for each service. The ETV version allows one fixed bit rate DSM-CC data carousel or Alternative Constrained Data Carousel.

The output of TSDeveloper is typically QAM modulated R/F, so it can be connected directly to one or multiple OCAP receivers and no modulator is required. [View Managed Scheduled Playouts screen shot of TSBDeveloper].

Features include:

1. OCAP application definition, import and export
2. application play-out, four services and four DSM-CC object carousels
3. real time updates to application data, via ftp, HTTP, file or database
4. bandwidth allocation
5. injection of do-it-now stream events
6. QAM output. Frequency, modulation mode and bandwidth can be changed via an administrative procedure.
7. Flexible Java API available for easy integration with authoring tools.

TSDeveloper servers are accessed by a web browser.

Both signed and unsigned OCAP applications are supported by TSDeveloper.

For signed (authenticated) applications, the appropriate hash, certificate and signature files are created using UniSoft's OCAP Security File Generator (OCAP SFG) prior to generation of the object carousel.

TSDeveloper plays-out multiple MPEG audio/video content from the hard drive which can be applied to any or all of the services being output. This provides video and audio on each service which is necessary for the testing and demonstration purposes.

OCAP service information (SI) is inserted in-band, suitable for OCAP set-top-boxes which do not contain a CableCARD or which are designed in stand-alone mode to search for SI in-band. The SI can also be excluded if required.

TSDeveloper is a companion product to S&T's TSBroadcaster, which is an OCAP and ETV encoding and play-out system suitable for live and test headends. TSBroadcaster supports out-of-band delivery of application signaling and DSM-CC object carousels and is usually installed on either a SunFire V240 system or HP DL 360 G5.