San Mateo, Calif.-based VOD and IPTV technology provider, Entone Technologies, says that Hong Kong-based PCCW--which claims to have the world's largest IPTV service (its service, dubbed Broadband TV, has garnered around 441,000 subscribers since its launch two years ago)--has selected a full suite of its technologies to support its new VOD service. Entone technologies that PCCW is now using include its StreamLiner Network Video Recorder (a software product designed to transform standard server and storage hardware from IBM and HP into video servers capable of ingesting, storing and streaming on-demand video programming; Entone touts the product as avoiding the inflexibility inherent in solutions based on proprietary hardware); its Encoding Studio content-ingest system (manages the process of capturing, encoding, providing quality assurance for, and staging digital assets, through what Entone claims is "comprehensive" workflow management); and its recently launched Armada Intelligent Asset Manager (Entone claims that the latter dynamically and cost-optimally distributes VOD assets to the most appropriate storage medium, server or network, based on real-time usage data: thus, an operator's most popular VOD assets will automatically be stored in RAM, while less popular assets will automatically be stored in much less expensive media, such as SATA; Entone says that the product continually makes adjustments to storage assignments, so that every storage device is fully utilized with the right balance of streaming capacity to storage space). "The Broadband TV service is a major growth driver for PCCW, with 92% of our new broadband data users also opting to subscribe to our television service," Paul Berriman, PCCW's head of strategic market development, said in a prepared statement. "The Entone solution allows us to expand our service offering to include personal television services such as time-shifted TV and movies-on-demand. We are pleased to be working with Entone in supporting our ambitious plans."
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