Elemental Technologies will power a unified video headend built by Panamanian pay TV operator Cable Onda. The deployment is intended to facilitate a consistent user experience (UX) across Cable Onda broadband networks and help the operator provide catchup TV, networked PVR applications and VOD services. Elemental solutions will also prepare the company for future 4K video offerings.
Cable Onda recently added over-the-top (OTT) and mobile content delivery to its portfolio of television, Internet and telephony services. With the new unified headend, Cable Onda will provide a single user interface (UI) across all of its platforms.
"Our business requirement was to offer innovative services to every device, along with lower cost of operation and simple and secure management tools," said Michael Maduro, vice president of strategic projects for Cable Onda. "Elemental could demonstrate precisely what we were looking for and worked well with our engineering and integration team, and with other technology partners. The result is the most modern unified headend in the region, achieving our vision of a next-generation subscriber experience that retains and builds on our already loyal audience, engaging them over HFC, OTT and mobile."
The new unified headend, built in-house by Cable Onda engineers, employs Elemental Live with statistical multiplexing capabilities and Elemental Server encoding and file-based appliances as well as Elemental Conductor for system management. Content will be delivered across the Cable Onda HFC network to homes and over broadband networks and mobile devices for TV Everywhere OTT services. Additionally, HEVC-compliant Elemental Live systems allow Cable Onda to add 4K services as the market demands. As part of the project, Cable Onda will also offer a new set-top box.