Bresnan Upgrades VOD with Harmonic

Cable operator expands video-on-demand capacity with new transmission gear.

By Glen Dickson -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/18/2008 9:00:00 AM

Cable operator Bresnan Communications, which serves some 300,000 subscribers across Colorado, Montana, Wyoming and Utah, expanded its video-on-demand capacity by buying new “edgeQAM” transmission systems from Harmonic.

Bresnan invested in Harmonic's Narrowcast Service Gateway (NSG) 9000 and 9116 edgeQAMs with Privacy Mode encryption, which allows VOD streams to be encrypted in real-time at the network edge in order to fight content piracy. The Harmonic edgeQAM platform will also allow Bresnan to evolve to a modular cable-modem-termination-system (M-CMTS) architecture in the future for greater bandwidth efficiency.

"As we were planning the expansion of our VOD architecture, two requirements were critical: the ability to deliver a secure and robust on-demand service today and to support other future applications such as modular CMTS to deliver more bandwidth in the future,” Bresnan vice president of strategic engineering Pragash Pillai said in a statement. “The NSG 9000 satisfies these requirements.”