TANDBERG Television, part of the Ericsson group (NASDAQ:ERIC), Sony, Neotion, and Strategy & Technology (S&T), have combined their industry expertise to deliver a Video on Demand (VoD) solution that enables cable operators to deliver network-based time-shift services and targeted adverts direct to the TV, without the need for a set-top box (STB).

The breakthrough industry collaboration allows standard TVs to support VoD right out of the box. This results in lower deployment costs for cable operators, who can avoid set-top box purchase and installation. Consumers benefit from reduced energy usage in the home and faster service availability — and they do not have to make time for an engineer’s visit. Cable operators have the opportunity to generate valuable new revenue streams and offer a better customer experience with on-demand services, and hence reduce subscriber churn. They maintain full control over the applications offered and the look and feel of the user interface. Meanwhile, viewers gain full PVR functionality on the TV with no storage and no extra cost.

At the heart of the system is a new common interface specification (CI Plus), an emerging industry standard defined by Sony and Neotion and their partners in the CI Plus Forum, which will soon be supported within 80 percent of Sony digital televisions and approximately 70 percent of all new integrated Digital TV sets. Coupled with more secure conditional access, this new interface enables applications — once downloaded from the CI Plus module — to be launched from a browser in a CI Plus TV or other compatible receiver, thus opening the door to applications such as Video on Demand (VoD) and Targeted Ad-insertion.

TANDBERG Television and Neotion have implemented a standards-based VoD system that combines Neotion’s CI Plus module and TANDBERG Television’s OpenStream® Digital Services Platform. This handles the management of content, session control, billing, catalogue generation, ad-insertion and resource management. By running a full VoD platform, including time-shift TV & nPVR (network Personal Video Recorder) on any CI Plus TV without a STB, Cable MSOs are spared the large capital expenditure of deployment by teams of technicians, as the system is simply installed by subscribers. This dramatically cuts the operator’s costs of migration from analogue to digital, and by delivering PVR functionality from the network rather than an internal HDD, the life of installed devices is also extended — so slashing downstream maintenance commitments.