--Company Opens New Indian Office, Prevails in DISH Litigation
--Integrates Jungo Middleware with TI's Puma 5 Chipsets
News Corp.-owned conditional access and interactive TV technology
provider, NDS, has been tapped by the US's third-largest cable MSO,
Cox Communications, to design a new interactive user-interface for its
legacy and next-generation set-top boxes. According to NDS, the new
UI, which will replace the operator's existing Aptiv guide, is
compatible with "many of" Cox's existing set-tops, is designed to be
forward-compatible with tru2way-enabled boxes, and can also run on
other devices, such as PC's. It is billed as integrating Cox's various
digital video services--including VOD, EPG, DVR and ITV
applications--into a centralized, user-friendly experience. Cox and NDS
say they have further enhanced the user experience by enabling
personalization by viewers to match their viewing preferences, and that
network-based "community sharing," which enables viewers to
recommend programs to one another, will also be part of the new
interface. "Cox is committed to giving our customers the best in simple,
consistent and intuitive navigation," Steve Necessary, Cox's VP of
video strategy and product management, said in a prepared statement.
"NDS has extensive knowledge in the development of advanced
applications and user interfaces for multiple platforms. We are looking
forward to working with them to deliver world-class services to our
customers, on a platform capable of supporting tomorrow's new
technologies."
According to the companies, Cox's UI partnership with NDS builds on
its selection of the latter's IEX automated set-top box testing solution
last January. NDS bills the IEX solution as combining hardware and
software to automatically test all interactive applications on set-top
boxes operating in both cable and telecommunications environments--a
task which was previously handled manually and was therefore
susceptible to human error. NDS claims that IEX provides a more
accurate and cost-effective alternative to manual testing.
In other NDS news:
- The company has opened a new Indian sales and support office in
New Delhi. Its customers in India--where it also operates offices in
Mumbai and Bangalore and has a total of around 900 staff--include
such pay-TV companies as Tata Sky, Hathway Cable, Datacom, Bharti
and Digital Entertainment Network.
- The company's subsidiary, Jungo, a provider of broadband residential
gateway software, says that its OpenRG residential gateway
middleware and its OpenSMB small and medium business gateway
middleware are now available to cable operators through an integration
with Texas Instruments' Puma 5 family of DOCSIS 3.0-based cable
modem chipsets. The Puma 5 product line is billed by TI as the
industry's first DOCSIS 3.0-compliant cable modem chipset and as
providing a flexible, scalable platform for next-generation voice, data
and video offerings. In touting the new integrated offering, NDS cites
market research reports that claim that, as the digital home landscape
continues to evolve towards IPTV, cable operators will face increasing
competition in home media offerings from competing service providers
and mobile operators: because DOCSIS 3.0 technology enables
advanced video services by delivering interactive IP video to the home
over DOCSIS, the company says, this allows cable operators to free up
bandwidth on multicast networks and to take advantage of the
innovative features offered by IP video. According to TI, the Puma 5
chipsets combine DOCSIS 3.0 features, such as channel bonding, with
TI's packet processing routing accelerator to enable bi-directional
bandwidth rates of over 160 Mbps in the downstream and up to 120
Mbps downstream in any packet size, routing or bridging, while
assuring "best-in-class" voice or video over IP QoS. The companies
claim that the combination of the Puma 5 chipsets with Jungo's
middleware will support such capabilities as wireless LAN, QoS, VoIP,
IP-PBX and UpnP AV Media Server, and will allow operators to offer
their subscribers gateways "that are designed for the rapid delivery of
advanced broadband services including home entertainment
applications, such as high definition IPTV and video-on-demand." "By
leveraging TI's Puma 5 family of proven DOCSIS 3.0 products with
packet process engine technology, we enabled Jungo to add its unique
residential gateway middleware platform on top of Puma 5 to create a
high-performance solution to offer our customers and other
multi-service operators," Ran Senderovitz, TI's cable business manager,
said in a prepared statement. "TI's Puma 5 chipset is designed to
empower our customers and partners with the ability to develop
differentiated software and hardware to meet the varied market demand
for voice, video and data services."
- DISH Network's corporate espionage lawsuit against the company has
resulted in a Pyrrhic victory for the satellite-TV provider. DISH--which
had claimed that NDS, in an attempt to boost the desirability of its own
security solutions, paid hackers to crack and distribute code from
DISH's NagraStar smartcards, thus resulting in widespread theft of its
service, and forcing it to distribute new smartcards to its
customers--was awarded actual damages of $45.69 (statutory damages
of $1,000) for just one of its claims in the case. It was reported to have
been seeking as much as $1.6 billion.
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