Canada's Cogeco Cable Selects Tandberg's OpenStream as its Exclusive Backoffice System

Ericsson-owned Tandberg Television announced Tuesday that Canada's Cogeco Cable has selected its OpenStream Digital Services Platform as its exclusive backoffice system. Cogeco is Canada's fourth-largest MSO, with around 400,000 digital subscribers in Quebec and Ontario. According to Tandberg, new consumer behaviors, combined with an explosion in video content, provide significant opportunities for Cogeco to deliver a more personalized television experience: the company claims that the OpenStream platform will integrate seamlessly into the operator's infrastructure to support such current services as VOD (including subscription and free VOD), and that it will also allow the operator to expand its on-demand services revenue while minimizing deployment costs. "We are committed to providing our subscribers with what they need to unlock a world of information and entertainment," Chris MacFarlane, Cogeco's VP of corporate engineering, said in a prepared statement. "We must constantly provide new and enhanced services to our subscribers for us to remain competitive. We wanted a backoffice system that could scale and grow with us. Tandberg Television's OpenStream provided us with all the features we were seeking and more."

According to Tandberg, Cogeco has targeted key features of the OpenStream backoffice system for immediate use, including the ability to create its own unique playlists, and the system's interactive catalog, which Tandberg bills as providing highly scalable, real-time catalog navigation. Tandberg claims that OpenStream is the industry's only complete on-demand platform to be based on open, published interfaces, and that it will allow Cogeco to easily deploy new on-demand services using system components of its choice. "Every day we demonstrate our support of operator-delivered services from simple VOD deployments to multiplatform TV by delivering open architecture solutions with best-in-class features," Andrew Rose, Tandberg's VP of software product management, said in a prepared statement. "We have long-standing relationships with operators and our products are driven by their requirements. We look forward to working with Cogeco Cable as they enhance their on-demand services."