Vidiom Systems has signed a licence agreement with OCAP Development, the joint venture between Time Warner Cable and Comcast, to enable it to licence OCAP middleware to operators and manufacturers worldwide.
Based in Colorado, Vidiom specialises in the design and development of interactive television middleware, applications and tools. Vidiom originally developed the OCAP middleware under contract to Time Warner, and subsequently under the joint OCAP Development initiative intended to ease the adoption of the OpenCable Applications Platform in the United States cable market.
“We assisted in the development of the specification, watched it mature through the standards process, built an implementation, and now with our flexible porting layer can assist in its deployment and adoption on a multitude of operating systems and platforms,” said Timothy Wahlers, president and chief executive of Vidiom Systems.
“Vidiom has been involved with OCAP since its inception,” remarked Kevin Leddy, who is responsible for strategy and development at Time Warner Cable. “Vidiom’s role as distributor and integrator of the OCAP Development middleware will help accelerate the development of next generation applications and ensure the continued delivery of advanced digital products to Time Warner Cable customers.”
“This is an exciting next step in the progression of OCAP becoming a widely available software platform for cable operators and application developers.” added Steve Heeb, responsible for product and business development at Comcast.
OCAP, part of the OpenCable initiative created by CableLabs, is based on MHP and is aimed at providing a unified, open standard that allows programmers to deploy interactive services over multiple cable networks, while enabling a retail market for digital cable receivers.
Vidiom has also extended its use of the TSBroadcaster OCAP encoder from Strategy & Technology and UniSoft. Vidiom uses S&T systems as part of a test platform for ensuring compliance with OCAP conformance tests from CableLabs. S&T has also announced that their carousel system will be made available as part of Scientific-Atlanta’s OCAP solution.