All things related to multicast

[Alan Crosswell <>]

Dov,

Thanks for the pointers.  What are folks using for encoders?  I assume they are 
mostly taking a DVB feed.  I recall Minerva having a box that does this a while 
ago.  This sounds a lot more attractive to me than what I've seen of a few 
deployments in .edu where individual analog channels (frequently having been 
decoded from MPEG) are re-encoded with one box per channel.  That doesn't scale 
well if one is truly trying to deliver 100's of channels like "real" 
cable/satellite TV.
/a


Dov Zimring wrote:
> These are Ethernet/IP Set Top Boxes and I see no reason these couldn't 
> be used in the enterprise.  Most of the commercial deployments I've been 
> involved with are telephone companies that own or share a Cable MSO and 
> are looking to extend their footprint to provide video service via Fiber 
> or DSL.  Encoding, transcoding, Video on Demand, integrated on screen 
> caller-id, all that fun stuff
>
> A few of the players in this space:
> http://www.aminocom.com
> http://www.i3micro.com/i3web
> http://www.2wire.com
> http://www.bastinc.com
>
> For commercial deployments these vendors integrate with various 
> middleware vendors to handle user accounts, retrieve corresponding 
> program guides and take care of all the back office accounting and 
> billing.  There are a number of middleware vendors out there, to name a 
> few:
> http://www.myrio.com
> http://www.minervanetworks.com
> http://www.infogateonline.com/content.asp?id=15
>
> There's a laundry list of other vendors for encoding/transcoding, VoD, 
> encryption, etc.  I've spent lots of time in the trenches deploying IPTV 
> over DSL with video headends that were built for CATV and then 
> retrofitted for IPTV.  Happy to share what I know.
>
> Regards,