BRIEFS

Panasonic is extending its offerings of P2 DVCPRO HD tapeless acquisition products for the 2006 National Association of Broadcasters show.

In a New York press conference last week, the Japanese company unveiled the AJ-HPC2000 DVPRO high-def camcorder and the AJ-HPS1500 HD recorder, both of which will be available in the fourth quarter.

Both products offer five slots for Panasonic's solid-state P2 memory cards for a total HD recording time of 40 minutes; each P2 card has 8 gigabytes of storage and can record eight minutes of high-def video at DVCPRO HD's 100-megabits-per-second data rate.

Pricing wasn't disclosed; previous-generation P2 high-def cameras cost around $5,995, and P2 cards sell for $1,400.

Panasonic also introduced the AK-HC1500 compact high-def camera, which is switchable between the 1080-line interlace and 720-line progressive HD formats. The camera supports variable frame rates from 4 to 60 frames per second to allow slow-motion camera effects.

It will be available in March priced at $19,950.

C-COR Inc., State College, Pa., says its IP-based advertising- insertion system has been deployed by cable operators Comcast, Charter and Adelphia.

According to C-COR, six Comcast Spotlight advertising markets—Boston, Denver, Miami, Philadelphia, San Francisco and St. Paul, Minn.—are rolling out the system, which the vendor calls Gigabit Ethernet Digital Program Insertion. Able to handle insertion of both standard- and high-definition MPEG-2 advertising, it has been deployed by Charter in the St. Louis market and by Adelphia in Cleveland.