Motorola in video-on-demand deal with WideOpenWest cable

Motorola, Inc announced that cable television provider WideOpenWest (WOW) has selected the Motorola B-1 Video Server to supply video on demand (VOD) to customers in the Detroit, Chicago, Columbus and Cleveland, OH markets.

“Our selection of the Motorola platform was based on performance; the Motorola server’s advanced technology affords us a reliable and scalable solution that has been proven in the market,” said Gary Nilsen, Vice President of Engineering, WOW.

“Scalability is critical as VOD popularity grows and it gives us the option of offering advanced services to our subscribers.  For example, the ability to expand the platform to offer time-shifting functionality or to offer addressable advertising is likely to become important for customer retention and to achieve incremental revenue opportunities going forward.”

The continued growth in VOD and the emergence of advanced services has led to greater demand on a service provider’s infrastructure. The Motorola Video Server B-1 platform addresses the capacity issues of VOD servers by providing extremely high stream density and ingest capability. The Motorola technology supports and efficiently scales for advanced applications such as high-definition VOD, time-shifted television and on demand ad insertion. The system streams content directly from Dynamic Random Access Memory and uses a carrier-class architecture for exceptional levels of reliability.

This announcement comes on the heels of a Motorola VOD milestone of 500,000 video streams shipped in less than three years. The April SNL Kagan newsletter VOD & ITV Investor notes that Motorola ranked #2 in VOD stream shipments in 2006.