Terayon makes its telco debut

SAN DIEGO -- Terayon Communication Systems, which has spent all of its history in the cable market, today is moving into the telco world with a new version of its DM 6400 Network CherryPicker ad insertion platform designed specifically for IPTV deployments.

Making its debut at the Telco TV Conference in San Diego, the new software allows carriers to insert ads into MPEG-4/AVC encoded video streams. Previously, the company had supported the ability to insert ads into IP streams, but this marks the first move into MPEG4, which many larger telcos are opting to use for their video deployments.

“The big difference here is the software capabilities we have are really for the telco market,” said Kanaiya Vasani, vice president of marketing for Terayon. Specifically, the company is marketing its ability to provide what Vasani said is a program redundancy into video networks.

“Some telcos want to build more of a cable like architecture. There are others that building more of an IP switch digital video system. The redundancy in those networks are primarily focused on network redundancy. We can provide program level redundancy.”

In program redundancy, the CherryPicker software is able to look inside video streams and control jitter, which is among the most important measures of video quality. The current architecture Terayon is promoting is to deploy the platform just before the video stream hits the DSLAM.

Like most new entrants in the telco video market, Terayon plans to go to market with larger system integrators, though it has yet to announce any partnerships.

“Time to market is of the essence for [carriers],” Vasani said. “We recognize that and that’s the reason we’re working with these system integrators. We also find ourselves getting pulled into the meetings with the telcos by these same companies.”