September 3, 2009

Hardware: RGB's Answer to Multi-Screen Challenge

Since Time Warner announced its "TV Everywhere" initiative, cable executives have been wrestling with how to monetize cable TV content that goes to other devices. But the technical folks have their own fish to fry: how best to deliver the content to various screens.

Hoping to fill that need, RGB Networks has announced a content repurposing solution to enable real-time delivery of any video to any device.

The goal is to enable video service providers to simultaneously deliver any video program to multiple devices – from TVs, to PCs, to mobile devices – via any network and with pristine picture quality.

RGB's graphic of its repurposing solution reminds one of BigBand's visual of its CVEx product. (For more on CVEx, click here). Both companies show lots of added complexity in the cable headend with content coming in varied formats and heading out to myriad devices.

BigBand's CVEx approaches the problem with a software solution.

"We're building a hardware product," said Ramin Farassat, VP of product marketing for RGB. "Everybody's trying to figure out how to streamline this process. Some companies are focusing on the management and control. We’re going down to the video streams and doing the actual functions."

RGB's content repurposing solution is actually an upgrade to its Modular Video Processor, which has been renamed "Video Multiprocessing Gateway" (VMG). The chassis-based VMG contains modules capable of transcoding and processing multiple streams in real time, while simultaneously performing a number of other functions, including aggregation, grooming, replication, transrating and ad insertion.

"Today these functionalities are performed with different devices," said Farassat. "RGB is saying it would be great to have this done in one place without the mess of wiring."

The VMG’s initial content repurposing capability will be delivered via a plug-in module, which can convert between MPEG-2 and MPEG-4/H.264 formats and enable a ‘many in, many out’ scenario via 10-Gigabit Ethernet input and output interfaces.

RGB will demonstrate the initial capabilities of its VMG at IBC2009, September 11-15, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

-Linda Hardesty