Louisville, Colorado, November 7, 2001—Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (CableLabs®) recently sponsored a successful test and demonstration of digital program insertion (DPI) technology that will enable cable operators to insert local digital advertisements in live digital video streams.

The testing and demonstration involved eight companies, a live feed donated by ESPN, and was done at CableLabs� facilities in Colorado. Motorola (Broadband Communications Sector) and Scientific-Atlanta contributed uplink equipment; BigBand Networks, Cisco Systems, Harmonic, and Terayon Communications Systems provided splicing equipment; and nCube and SeaChange International provided digital advertising servers.

�This type of industry collaboration, achieved around a set of standards approved by the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) and aimed at enabling a new revenue generating aspect of the business, goes to the heart of why the cable industry agreed to establish such a laboratory in the first place," said CableLabs President and CEO Dr. Richard R. Green.

Held at CableLabs from October 22 to October 29, the testing pertained to numerous aspects of the standards (SCTE DVS 253 and DVS 380), which are considered important for initial deployment of DPI equipment. The testing was designed to determine that vendor equipment is highly compliant to this subset of DVS253 and DVS380 functionality. This functionality is considered to be comparable to ad insertion functionality available in the analog and hybrid domains. A report will be made available to CableLabs member companies and the highlights will be detailed in a report issued by CableLabs and also submitted to the SCTE as a DVS document.

Paul Woidke of Adlink, chair of SCTE Working Group 5, led the session; Dr. Mukta Kar, senior advisor, digital network architecture for CableLabs, headed the CableLabs team. Joe Davis, the co-chair of Working Group 5 and a CableLabs consultant, was responsible for the Phase 2 test / demonstration planning and for the execution of the testing. The first phase of testing was done at CableLabs this past summer.

The event also featured the live delivery of DVS 253 cue messages in a satellite feed provided by ESPN-2. During the public Exhibition, visitors were able to watch as digital splicers and servers responded to the cue messages that were injected into the digital stream at the ESPN-2 uplink on the East Coast and received at the CableLabs facility in Louisville.

The cue messages triggered the insertion of local commercials into the digital network stream seamlessly. No audible or visual artifacts were observed in the resulting program stream that was decoded and displayed using Motorola and Scientific-Atlanta set-top boxes currently deployed.

The exhibition also demonstrated dual audio (multi-lingual) capabilities of the splicing equipment as well as changes in the audio bit rate and in horizontal resolution without objectionable audio/video artifacts.
About CableLabs: Cable Television Laboratories (www.cablelabs.com) was founded in 1988 by members of the cable television industry. A non-profit research and development consortium, CableLabs delivers innovations that enable cable operators to be the providers of choice in their markets. Cable operators from around the world are members. CableLabs maintains additional web sites at www.cablenet.org and www.ebif.tv.

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