BigBand’s big bang: Personalized video services

All of that has to happen in a network designed for high availability and low cost of operations, supported by back-office systems designed for dynamic transactions and the ability to turn up bundled service offerings quickly, Reister said. BigBand’s network processing modules can create unicast and multicast streams and have an addressability and feedback engine.

“The key is to achieve a high degree of scalability for feedback to advertisers and be able to communicate with all clients so you can see which households saw which message,” Reister said.

CPE-based set-top-box solutions to personalization introduce new complexity into the equation, for managing devices and scaling, Reister said. Centralized unicast solutions also have scaling and QoS challenges, while distributing multiple smaller systems creates management complexity and is capex-intensive.

BigBand’s MSP-2000 can sit anywhere between the video headend and the video service hub, Reister said, which means it can be deployed at the headend initially and gradually migrate closer to the customer as demand and revenues warrant. In addition, the system is able to manipulate and deal with encrypted video streams, splicing in specific ads as needed.

“We are the first in the industry to talk about this,” Reister said. “It is going to be a challenge because streams are encrypted at the SHE [super headend], but addressable ad splicing needs to be handled at the regional level or in zones and needs to happen for high-def, standard-def and PIP [picture in picture] streams.”

The MSP2000 also handles group splicing whether the group is a geographical node of customers or the group of customers watching a specific program, Reister said.