Also: Evolution gets NCTC hunting license; Cass Cable says goodbye to MPEG-2; TiVo to remove Blockbuster app
Tuesday's cable news roundup kicks off with some wheeling and dealing tied to this week's National Cable Television Cooperative Inc. (NCTC) Winter Education Conference in Austin, Texas.
A handful of small cable operators are turning to Clearleap 's cloud-based ClearPlay platform to help them bridge video-on-demand to broadband-connected consumer electronics devices over IP. ETS Cablevision of Houston and Greenlight of North Carolina (a municipally-owned provider) are streaming VoD to TiVo Inc. (Nasdaq: TIVO) boxes, while ImOn Communications of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is making plans to pipe an on-demand service to Roku Inc. devices. Jackson Energy Authority of Jackson, Tenn., is also using ClearPlay but didn't identify which end devices its subs will use to access VoD. Clearleap has also developed modules for linear TV and mobile devices.
Elsewhere in independent cable land, Evolution Digital LLC has scored a hunting license that will let it sell broadband-connected TiVo boxes and simple Digital Terminal Adapter (DTA) devices via the NCTC, a firm that handles bulk purchase deals for its 1,000-strong membership, made up of Tier 2/3 MSOs.
Cass Cable TV has shut down its MPEG-2 video platform after migrating to one based on MPEG-4 from Avail-TVN . Cass Cable finished the migration on Feb. 1 and is offering standard- and high-def programming and VoD using the more bandwidth-efficient codec.
TiVo plans to remove the Blockbuster Inc. VoD app from DVRs at the end of March, but its absence will be temporary, notes ZatzNotFunny. Blockbuster, now part of the Dish Network LLC (Nasdaq: DISH) empire, told the blog that it's working on a "more scalable and reliable infrastructure" and hopes to resume its relationship with TiVo later this year. (See Dish Bundles Up Blockbuster .)
— Jeff Baumgartner, Site Editor, Light Reading Cable
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