Time Warner Cable gets local with on demand

Broadbus announced today it has signed Time Warner Cable San Antonio as the first customer for its new Content Commander video-on-demand software.

Using the software on the vendor’s servers, Time Warner customers will have access to a local affiliate’s news content on demand. The cable operator’s initial implementation will put News 4 WOAI On Demand on Time Warner’s Digital Channel 989 as part of its Free On Demand channel lineup. Viewers also will be able to watch local programming such as “San Antonio Living” and “Sports Sunday.” Newscasts will be archived for 24 hours, and “San Antonio Living” and “Sports Sunday” will be available for a week.

The San Antonio application is just the first of what Broadbus CEO and Chairman Vin Bisceglia expects to be a significant trend among video providers.

“Not only are the subscribers growing, but also the libraries are growing from a couple thousand hours to 8000 or 10,000 hours,” he said. “We saw an application for local content on demand that was not being captured and not being provided to subscribers.”

As part of the process, Time Warner Cable will encode programs in real time and typically have them available for viewing within about 5 minutes after the end of the broadcast.

Future implementations of the software may include some search capabilities, Bisceglia said, though that is still in the lab for the moment. The company, which has had some significant success in the cable market despite being only four years old, also is looking at moving into the telco video market, he said.

“We are exploring applications to provide not just HFC video, but also IP video. We also recognize that advance codecs such as MPEG 4 are on the horizon. We have those available in the labs but they’re not at general availability yet.”