Product Parade

December 3, 2003
TVoDSL delivers triple-play services over IP

NEW DElHI -- UT Starcom is marketing the MediaSwitch, an end-to-end solution designed for telecom operators and broadband service providers in India for delivering "triple play" broadcast quality TV and on-demand entertainment service over IP networks. Leveraging on UT Starcom's commercially proven mSwitch technology, the MediaSwitch has been designed from inception with the scalability, reliability and price points required to revolutionise the delivery of telco TV and entertainment services.

It offers a complete broadband digital TV delivery solution, covering live TV/video encoding and trans-coding, streaming and storage, and a full suite of OSS, including media asset management, subscriber management, content management, customer self-service and billing and network management. With a distributed architecture and a cluster-based server design, MediaSwitch supports over 15,000 subscribers and delivers over 24,000 hours of media content per telco rack. The proprietary broadband media distribution protocol (BMDP) allows a complete random access of any program any time, anywhere, by any user.

The media console supports broadcast quality MPEG-2, MPEG-4, WM-9 and H.264 streaming. It allows software-enabled field upgrades, and can encode to support video phone/videoconferencing. Designed for central office (CO) deployment, its media station features chassis-based servers with hot swappable blades. The distributed system offers redundancy and reliability unmatched by other products. Each media engine blade supports upto 200 concurrent unicast subscribers and stores over 640 hours of media content; up to 12 hours of programming content; and up to 40Gbps aggregated streaming bandwidth. It is tightly integrated with UT Starcom's IP-DSLAM featuring IGMP snooping capabilities. The content engine encodes and transcodes up to 16 live channels per content engine, linearly scalable.

To protect the operator's investment as technologies evolve, codec upgrades are entirely software-based, requiring no hardware swapout. Ruchir Godhra, country manager and director, South Asia operations said that government and cyber initiatives, as well as TV-over-DSL (TVoDSL), besides gaming, adult content, music and gambling were the key drivers in Asia. "In India, broadband is likely to be the panacea for fixed-line operators' woes. A multiple operator scenario is likely in 2004. In MediaSwitch, UT Starcom has a viable, end-to-end, carrier-class TVoDSL solution," he added.