November 18, 2011

ARRIS Debuts Products for Assurance, Advertising, Transcoding

Georgia-based ARRIS used the SCTE's Cable-Tec Expo, held in Atlanta this week, to introduce some new products including outage management software, an advertising platform and its next-gen transcoding platform.

ARRIS added EventAssure Outage Management software to its suite of assurance solutions. EventAssure is integrated with ARRIS ServAssure Advanced through a common polling infrastructure to support automatic identification of plant and service failures. This infrastructure enhancement means that cable operators can now benefit from ARRIS’ comprehensive performance and outage management solutions, using the same polling architecture to collect data from all DOCSIS devices.

ARRIS AdManager is a new standards-based platform enabling cable providers to offer a new generation of advertising services. AdManager addresses in several ways the challenges and opportunities associated with emerging dynamic advertising systems: by focusing on increasing ad value and yield management; by streamlining nationwide operations; and by providing robustness and scalability to handle a rapidly increasing number of dynamic ad placements. AdManager allows providers to extend advertising campaigns across addressable, IP-capable devices like tablets, connected TVs, game stations, laptops and smart phones. AdManager builds upon ARRIS' widely deployed SkyVision product suite, augmenting current advertising workflow.

VIPr 6000, the next generation in its VIPr transcoding platform is made possible through recent advancements in silicon. The VIPr 6000 delivers a three-fold improvement in channel processing capacity - delivering three times the number of HD/SD channels per encoder chassis - at state-of-the industry video compression levels. This new capability reduces per stream powering needs and rack space used in the headend.  Cable service providers currently use the VIPr platform to transcode channels from MPEG-2 to H.264, from H.264 to MPEG-2 and to compress four high definition MPEG-2 video channels onto one QAM channel. While retaining all the VIPr’s quality algorithms, the VIPr 6000’s increased density allows for significant improvements in HD channel compression, without sacrificing video quality. The VIPr 6000 platform offers integrated transcoding, multiplexing, ad-splicing operations and is capable of processing up to 24 QAMs of video per rack unit in high density configuration. Other 6000 platform enhancements include a redundant power supply, and added asynchronous serial interface (ASI) options.