Louisville, Colorado, March 4, 2002—Cable Television Laboratories, Inc. (CableLabs®) has completed the first of a set of specifications to create a common approach to handling descriptive data that is associated with on-demand video events.

Called Metadata, this information could vary from being data that identifies a title of a video-on-demand (VoD) event or movie, to how a movie or event may be licensed and displayed. At present, there is no agreed upon common approach to how metadata may be handled.

CableLabs members believe that by having a common approach to metadata, VoD operating costs could be reduced, content encoding costs could be lowered, and it will be easier to integrate VoD metadata with program navigational features, electronic program guides, and bandwidth management services located at cable system headends.

Along with the release of CableLabs VoD Content Specification V1.0, CableLabs also has formed a royalty-free Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) pool that has been signed by contributors to the specification: Time Warner Cable, N2 Broadband, DIVA, SeaChange, Concurrent Computer Corp., and nCUBE. Licensed implementers will have a copyright license to the issued specification as well as participation in the royalty-free IPR pool.

Work will continue on additional metadata specifications through 2002 with the assistance of the cable, hardware vendor, and content provider communities. Released specifications are available on CableLabs' Web site at www.cablelabs.com/projects/metadata.
About CableLabs
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.

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