Showing that it's making some hay off an exclusive distribution and technology licensing deal with Sling Media announced last fall, Arris said two operators have signed on to roll out its whole home HD-DVR paired with the MS4000 Media Streamer, a place-shifting device that enables users to stream live and recorded video in or out of the home to mobile devices.
Under those deployments of Arris’s Whole Home Solution, a platform whose roots are tied to the vendor’s 2009 acquisition of Paul Allen’s Digeo and its “Moxi” product line, Service Electric Cable TV and Comporium will offer a media gateway outfitted with six tuners, a DOCSIS 3.0 modem, integrated WiFi, and a fancy user interface in tandem with the MS4000.
It will be up to the operators to determine whether they’ll offer their full live TV lineup or a subset of those channels via the MS4000 in or out of the home. The MS4000 is currently configured to deliver up to four HD video streams on the home network, or three in the home and one outside the home, simultaneously.
How those operators, or any others that employ the MS4000, proceed in that area will be determined in part by their particular content rights, Ron Miller, vice president of product management for Arris’s Consumer Solutions Group, explained, noting that the device can be configured to deliver all or portions of a pay-TV operator’s live TV lineup.
Comporium will sell the MS4000 under the name “Moxi Sling” to customers who take its Whole Home Solution product, and will offer it at its retail locations in the Upstate region of South Carolina. The Comporium Moxi Whole Home HD DVR app is initially available to subscribers with tablets and smartphones running iOS, with future support slated for Android-powered devices.
"Our subscribers want to watch their live and recorded content across a variety of mobile devices, inside and outside of the home," said Matthew Dosch, executive vice president, customer operations and external affairs at Comporium, in a statement. "The Arris MS4000 is a powerful device that enables us to further drive our TV Everywhere initiatives."
Service Electric is marketing its new Sling-capable whole-home platform to systems that serve about 125,000 homes in parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
"Our launch of the Whole Home Solution and available MS4000 marks a continued expansion of our partnership with ARRIS," said John M. Walson, President Of Service Electric. "We constantly hear from our customers about their desire to stream content to their tablets, laptops, and other mobile devices. Through our ARRIS partnership we now have the ability to fulfill that need and extend subscribers' content experiences throughout the home and on-the-go,” said Service Electric president John M. Walson, in a statement.
Consolidated Communications, meanwhile, announced that it has begun to deploy Arris’s Whole Home Solution and ConvergeMedia Management Suite across its Kansas City market, but made no mention of when or if it intends to pair that with the Arris/Sling media streamer.
