May 11, 2007

Pace Flips Out in Las Vegas

By Mike Robuck

Product demonstrations proliferated the show floor last week in Las Vegas like neon lights along the Strip, so we won't get to a lot of them in this edition of the newsletter.

One interesting demonstration of note was by Pace Micro Technology, which included "flipping" a Pace set-top box to OCAP capabilities via a software download.

"All of our boxes run in the native or OCAP environments," explained Tim O'Loughlin, Pace's vice president of sales and marketing, U.S. Cable. "You can launch with a legacy type box running the native TV Guide, or you can turn it into a fully compliant OCAP box by downloading the OCAP stack and applications. MSOs call that 'flipping' a box, and it takes about 8 minutes to turn one of our legacy, out-of-band boxes into one with DSG (DOCSIS Set-top Gateway)."

The flipping on a Motorola DAC headend assigns objects to the box using a background download, which means the customer doesn't know the change is taking place. The Motorola-based Pace set-top boxes currently work with TV Guide and Aptiv electronic program guides. Pace will go directly to the OCAP environment for its Scientific Atlanta-based set-top boxes.

At the show, Pace publicly showed for the first time the removable security versions of its deployed Tahoe HD DVR and Vegas SD DVR with CableCard interfaces, as well as its newest CableCard interface set-top box, the Miami HD.

- Mike Robuck