Comcast Media Center in VOD Deal with Univision

Comcast Media Center (CMC), a business unit of the eponymous MSO that provides centralized content-management and distribution solutions for cable systems, video content providers and advertisers, said Tuesday that it has been tapped by US Spanish-language broadcaster, Univision Communications, to manage distribution of its Univision On Demand VOD service, which features content from Univision Communications' three linear networks, Univision, TeleFutura and Galavision. CMC claims that its national VOD platform reaches over 35 million VOD-enabled households and offers rapid-turn capabilities for acquiring and encoding linear TV programs, such as live sports events, providing near-real-time delivery to local VOD servers.

Univision On Demand--known as "Univision Ordena y Disfruta" in Spanish--offers a range of programming and events coverage from Univision, including FIFA World Cup soccer coverage; the Latin music awards show, "Premio Lo Nuestro a la Musica Latina"; "Premios Juventud," a youth-targeted awards show that recognizes Latino achievement in film, music, sports, fashion and pop culture; and a range of Univision's lifestyle, news, sports and reality programs. It is currently available in markets served by Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon FiOS TV, and CMC says that it will be helping Univision to roll it out industry-wide in the coming months. "We are looking forward to supporting Univision in its efforts to offer a wide sampling of its content genres to the country's Spanish-speaking households," CMC SVP and COO, Gary Traver, said in a prepared statement. "In addition, the availability of Univision On Demand via the CMC supports the objective of service providers serving over 90% of the country's VOD-enabled households to make popular multicultural programming available to their customers."

According to CMC, its rapid-turn capabilities support C3 audience measurement by incorporating the profiles for C3 commercial ratings, provided by Nielsen, in VOD programming delivered to local cable systems for timeshifted viewing within hours of its original broadcast. CMC, which claims to manage and distribute over 9,000 VOD assets from over 276 content sources to 35 million VOD households across the US, also recently launched a "user-directed" Express Lane VOD service which it says can deliver individual VOD assets to selected cable system headends.