REDWOOD CITY, Calif. -– BigBand Networks, Inc., a leading provider of broadband multimedia platforms for broadcast television and on-demand services, today announced support for PSIP (Program and System Information Protocol) over cable networks. BigBand Networks is supporting this standard for conveying program information and enhancing subscriber functionality in advance of the Federal Communications Commission’s July 1, 2004 mandatory deployment deadline. Several major cable operators have deployed PSIP functionality with the BigBand Grooming and BigBand HDTV applications that control channel line-up, video quality and bandwidth efficiency of standard-definition and high-definition digital television.

The cable industry is aggressively fulfilling FCC commitments and enhancing subscriber experiences through PSIP implementation. The programmable BigBand BMR platform, which already provides live broadcast content to more than half of all U.S. digital cable subscribers, facilitates this transition through PSIP support by easy software upgrade.

PSIP standardizes data vital to subscribers’ viewing experiences, including channel location, program description, closed captioning and V-chip parental controls. Any BigBand BMR® (Broadband Multimedia-Service Router) running the company’s Grooming or HDTV applications can be upgraded to extract PSIP data tables from local broadcast sources, regenerate tables for carriage on cable plants, and modulate them in-band, multiplexed with the associated digital video content, for greatest bandwidth efficiency. Data from the tables are then available to subscriber devices, including cable-ready digital televisions accessing local digital programming.

BigBand Networks Inc.