Opening a new sales window to the nation’s independent cable operators, Qwilt said it has inked a master agreement to hawk its transparent video caching products to members of the National Cable Television Cooperative, a group that negotiates tech and programming deals for its 950-plus membership.
The deal, announced amid The Independent Show that’s underway in Kansas City, centers on Qwilt’s Video Caching Solution, considered “transparent” because it’s built to manage and optimize the delivery of over-the-top video streams at the edge of the network from a variety of sources, including Netflix, Twitch, YouTube, and Hulu, among others. That’s in contrast to single-purpose caches, such as the appliance offered to ISPs by Netflix as part of the video streaming giant’s Open Connect program.
Qwilt said its platform is already deployed at a number of NCTC members, but didn’t offer a full list of them. Known Qwilt customers include Mediacom Communications, Choice Cable of Puerto Rico, Clear Lake Independent Telephone Company, and Yucca Telecom.
“By serving popular bandwidth-consuming content like streaming online video and system updates from inside the network, Qwilt’s platform reduces network congestion, improves the broadband experience for our customers, and helps us take a strategic, data-driven approach to expanding our network capacity,” said Brandon Brooks, IP manager of Yucca Telecom, in a statement .
Qwilt, which counts PeerApp among its competitors, raised a $16 million Series C round of funding last July that extended its total to about $40 million. In January, Qwilt launched a software upgrade that helps MSOs and other network operators keep bandwidth in check when shuttling in both managed- and unmanaged live video streams, complementing its earlier work around on-demand video streams.
