VDSL to transport multi-channel digital TV

DENVER—iMagicTV and Inovia Telecoms capitalized on their commitment to very high bit-rate DSL (VDSL) by co-marketing a solution that enables service providers to offer multi-channel digital television over the technology. The partnership was announced at this week’s DSLCon.

Under the agreement, iMagicTV’s DTV Manager software will be incorporated with Inovia’s Hi-FOCuS DSL platform. Inovia is an ECI Telecom company.

“What makes it very important is that our platform was designed from the beginning to be able to carry video,” said Dan Doczy, vice president of marketing and business development for the broadband access networks unit of ECI. In addition, it was important to provide the service provider with line of sight all the way to the customer premises equipment, Doczy said.

“The idea is to come up with applications that show the [quality of service] of the platform,” he explained.

The platform enables service providers to offer multichannel broadband TV services including media-on-demand, as well as traditional telephony services.

“It’s not just streaming Internet or streaming video,” said Robert Begg, senior marketing manager for iMagicTV. “A multi-vendor approach is probably most palatable for a service provider.”

Because Hi-FOCuS and DTV Manager are built on open standards, the solution supports multiple vendor environments, Doczy said. “One of the things that we have stuck to through the whole process is being standards-based,” he said.

It all comes down to content, according to Begg, an area iMagicTV hopes to leverage through its partnership with Inovia. “We’ve been around about three years, but the content gets easier and easier. From a TV perspective, none of our customers have had difficulty getting content.”