NCTA: Comcast Puts VoD Content on ‘Express Lane’

Comcast Media Center (CMC), a business unit of Comcast Corp., is introducing and demonstrating at the Cable Show ’09 a new service for VoD content providers.

Called Express Lane, the new service gives TV networks, advertisers, cable MSOs and other content service companies the ability to accelerate the delivery of VoD content to near-real time by publishing their VoD content directly into the CMC’s VoD distribution platform, which reaches more than 30 million VoD-enabled households nationwide.

In addition, CMC’s Express Lane service allows VoD content providers to direct the delivery of individual VoD assets to specific cable system headends, enabling more flexibility to produce and deliver content to a particular marketplace. It also adds the functionality to post VoD programming to a "bull pen" where content providers can preview the video programming and select the cable systems that should receive a particular VoD asset.

“Express Lane represents a significant breakthrough in the delivery of on-demand content by accelerating the delivery of personally relevant content to the industry’s VoD customers,” stated Gary Traver, senior vice president and COO for Comcast Media Center. “Moreover, Express Lane uses the CMC’s best in class and ‘trusted source’ content management technology to provide greater flexibility and efficiency for VoD content distribution, which reduces our clients’ operating costs while improving their time-to-market capabilities.”

Launched in 2003, the CMC’s MPEG-2 VoD platform allows affiliates to schedule time-sensitive programming, such as full-length sports events and event highlight shows. CMC has expanded its VoD capabilities to support MPEG 4 as well as MPEG 2 encoding and transport to cable systems nationwide.

CMC’s platform-independent VoD service can capture content in nearly any format, from anywhere, and provide encoding from 1mbps to 50mbps.