Briefs

Adelphia, the nation's fifth-largest cable operator, is deploying Gotuit Media's VOD navigation technology (Gotuit On Demand) as well as the company's music, news and sports VOD products. David Daniels, director of product management for the operator's Northeast region, says Adelphia believes the products will drive both revenue and subscriber loyalty. The music service offers videos, while the news service provides more than one hour of indexed news content each day from Reuters, Associated Press and local sources. The sports service includes college sports, wrestling and instructional videos.

Viacom has added a Pesa Cheetah digital router to WFOR Miami's production and playout facility. The facility handles operations for WFOR and four other Florida broadcasters: WBFS Miami and WTVX, WTCN, and WWHB, all in West Palm Beach. The new router has 512 inputs and outputs, with 256x192 being SD and 128x128 being HD/SD multiple bit rate.

Telestream's Flip4Mac MXF (Material Exchange Format) import system is now available for Apple's Mac OS X platform. Apple Final Cut Pro 5 users will be able to use it to take MXF-based XDCAM content directly into the editing system without having to uncompress it. David Heppe, Telestream senior VP of sales and marketing, says the move addresses the needs of a growing number of Apple Final Cut Pro users in the broadcast industry.

German pay-TV operator Premier AG will begin delivering three channels of DTV content via satellite to Germany with the help of the Digital Playout Centre (DPC) near Munich. Premier AG is a client of the DPC (which is owned by satellite-services provider SES Astra), which will use Tandberg's EN5990 HD MPEG-4 AVC video encoding and distribution for HD-signal delivery. Jens Leidenberger, DPC director, consumer projects, says the past six months have seen a significant shift in Europe's HDTV landscape as major broadcasters in France, Germany and the UK have unveiled HD plans.