Arris Trials Hybrid DVR for In-Home IP
Arris is demonstrating a headed gateway at The Cable Show that can source content from QAM and IP video streams and transmit both as IP in a subscriber's home.
LOS ANGELES -- The Cable Show -- Arris, or at least the part of Arris that was once Motorola, has long talked about a video transcoding gateway that would take in QAM video signals and turn them into IP video signals for distribution in the home. Now it appears the time for this product has finally arrived.
At The Cable Show here this week, Arris Group Inc. (Nasdaq: ARRS) is showing off a digital video recorder (DVR) called the MG2400 that can take content from a QAM video stream or an adaptive bit rate (ABR) IP video stream and transmit it around the subscriber's home as an IP stream to multiple connected devices. According to Jonathan Ruff, senior director of global technical marketing for Arris, the MG2400 isn't commercially available yet, but it is in trials.
One of the technology challenges that Arris is still working on with the MG2400 is the channel change process and keeping latency there to a minimum. Ruff said that Arris, which is working with CableLabs on the issue, is actually trying to optimize the channel change speed by switching viewers briefly to a unicast stream and then back to an ABR multicast stream after the change is complete.
At the Arris booth on the show floor, Ruff also highlighted a new headed gateway called the DCX3620. The gateway has 802.11ac WiFi built in and will support RDK 2.0. It will ultimately stream content out to IP-only boxes that will also run on the Reference Design Kit (RDK) platform for IP video.
Like the MG2400, the DCX3620 is not yet deployed. An earlier model, however, has been rolled out with Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA, CMCSK) as the XG1.
— Mari Silbey, special to Light Reading
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