June 29, 2007

Bresnan Cherry Picks Terayon for Digital Simulcast

By Mike Robuck

Despite the distractions of the July 1 deadline for separable security (see second story below), Bresnan has moved forward this year with its digital simulcast rollouts in the northern part of its footprint.

Bresnan announced last week that it was using Terayon's DM 6400 Network CherryPicker to help with the heavy lifting for its digital program insertion and zoned advertising.

"Once we launch simulcast to customers, we migrate to the digital insertions because now the customers with the digital set-top boxes aren't getting the analog lineup at all since their source is digital now," said Pragash Pillai, Bresnan's vice president of strategic engineering. "For those customers, if we don't migrate to the DPI platform, they're going to get national ads."

In March, Bresnan launched digital simulcast out of its Billings, MT, central headend. From the central headend, Bresnan subsequently rolled out simulcast to the Bozeman, Missoula and Helena markets. Bresnan is currently testing in Cheyenne and Casper, but hasn't launched simulcast in those Wyoming markets yet.

As a former employee of Charter, Pillai has been down the digital simulcast train tracks a time or two.

A distributed approach

"If you look at the digital stuff, there are two ways of doing this; one is centralized, and one is distributed," he explained. "We took the distributed approach (at Bresnan) because we have existing analog insertion equipment distributed throughout the network. With distributed, you use less bandwidth than centralized solutions, so we went down the path of distributed. We just upgraded our existing analog insertion equipment to support digital."

Pillai said from a deployment standpoint, digital simulcast is much easier these days than when he first worked on it four years ago at Charter.

"The nice thing about having it on digital is that you can monitor this stuff; for example, you can monitor the DPI triggers," he said. "When you do all of this in analog, there's not much visibility in terms of operations. With digital, you get a lot more visibility and lot more control."

The majority of the DPI triggers, which are used in digital insertions to mark the splice in and splice out locations, originate in Billings before they're sent out over Bresnan's IP network to the other headends, although some DPI triggers originate locally for the local channels in other markets. Pillai said the triggers are generated locally by connecting an encoder to the satellite audio receiver to create the trigger.

Bresnan is using EGT's Encore and Quartet systems for MPEG-2 encoding and digital program insertion applications in Billings and surrounding sites for its digital simulcast video network. Bresnan started using RGB Networks' simulcast edge processor about 45 days ago.

As far as HD insertion goes, Pillai said Bresnan would start doing some trials later this year.

"From an HD DPI standpoint, we're probably going to use a different vendor," Pillai said. "We're looking at more addressable advertising as an '08 initiative."

  - Mike Robuck