Vubiquity, an aggregator of premium content, said it has struck a deal to make its LiveVU linear TV platform available to members of the National Cable Television Cooperative (NCTC), a group that negotiates carriage and tech deals for more than 850 independent cable operators.
The LiveVU hosted MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 service, which offers more than 720 standard- and high-definition channels, including pay-per-view offerings, carves out a migration path to more bandwidth-efficient MPEG-4-based feeds as cable operators start to retire MPEG-2-based gear, Vubiquity said.
Vubiquity said LiveVU is compatible with MPEG-2 and MPEG-4-based set-top boxes, DAC/NAS/NASRAC, and cable systems that run on Arris, Verimatrix, Mediaroom (now run by Ericsson), and Minerva platforms.
“NCTC’s partnership with Vubiquity offers access to technology and content packages that help drive down the costs associated when providing cable TV,” Corey McCarthy, NCTC’s CFO and SVP of business development, said in a statement. “Vubiquity’s LiveVU service offers our members flexibility and choice by offering both MPEG2 and MPEG4 linear feeds, providing bandwidth, compression and network capacity advantages our members can take advantage of.”
“Our LiveVU solution addresses the challenge most cable operators continue to try to solve - the ongoing operational and capital costs associated to managing a headend,” added Vubiquity president Doug Sylvester. “LiveVU delivers bandwidth and network capacity savings, mitigates the need for costly headend upgrades, and provides the springboard for future monetization services for NCTC’s membership base.”
NCTC also works with Comcast Wholesale, striking a multiyear renewal recently for the HITS National Authorization Service that includes new provisions for NCTC members to use “universal” digital transport adapters (uDTAs), which are one-way "channel zappers" that can operate on Cisco Systems- and Arris-based digital video networks.
