WATCH VIDEOS. Cable Europe has announced that this year’s three nominations are R, Celeno and UPC Hungary.
All Cable Congress attendees are entitled to vote for the project that should be awarded Cable Europe’s Innovation Award Winner 2015. The Cable Europe Innovation and Fellow Award winners will be announced at Cable Congress 2015 at 10:30am on March 12, 2015.
Nominee 1: Cloud video Engine for the realtime generation of interactive channels by R, Syntheractive & Cinfo
R has launched a cloud video encoding platform. This platform can handle hundreds of video inputs, either from the cable tv headend, from the field (mobile cameras, IP cameras) or from stored video libraries. The platform transforms those inputs into thousands of videostreams. Each videostream script is created by a “cloud video app” residing on the servers. Local app in the device is minimised just to sending user keystrokes upstream and DRM protection, if needed. This Project has been developed in house, through our daughter video company Cinfo in collaboration with a local startup (Syntheractive) and the University of La Coruña.
Nominee 2:OptimizAIR by Celeno and Telenet
Celeno’s innovative OptimizAIR 2.0 enables Telenet to safely turn home routers into community hotspots while ensuring home users continue to receive uninterrupted Wi-Fi service with a high quality of experience. It also provides Telenet with exciting new opportunities to expand their service offering and entice new and existing customers.
Nominee 3: TV Apps on legacy set-top boxes by UPC Hungary, Metrological and ActiveVideo
UPC Hungary. Bringing online content to pay-TV subscribers is a win-win for the online and pay-TV industries, but until UPC Hungary teamed up with Metrological and ActiveVideo last summer, no one had been able to do it at scale without the purchase of costly set-top boxes. UPC Hungary worked with its partners to offer over 20 apps on TV via any set-top box in the UPC Hungary subscriber footprint. This has provided UPC Hungary with a powerful new service differentiator that is a world’s-first achievement for cable: the ability to offer an almost limitless source of online content to every subscriber, without the cost and time-to-market that rolling out new set-top boxes would have entailed.
Last year, Dutch cable operator Ziggo won the Cable Europe Innovation Award, voted on by delegates at Cable Congress, for its Interactive Digital Cable with no STB offer. Ziggo became the first operator in the world to deliver VOD and catch-up TV services to CI Plus 1.3 devices, eliminating the need for a set-top box and allowing consumers to realise the Bring Your Own Device promise. On the video, Ziggo’s Eric Meijer explains the STB-less solution.
