A Comcast spokeswoman confirmed today that the nation’s largest cable operator is implementing a trial of switched digital video (SDV) in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area.
SDV has been around since 2004, when the first trial took place in Austin, Texas, with BigBand Networks and Time Warner Cable.
Switched digital video sends just the programming that people in a service group or node are watching, instead of the entire slate of channels. SDV could eventually be used to share bandwidth resources between video silos such as video-on-demand (VOD) and SDV, but its immediate impact is reclaiming bandwidth.
While Comcast has been slower on the uptake of SDV than some other cable operators (story here), it also has SDV trials underway in Denver and Cherry Hill, N.J.
Comcast has selected EdgeQAMs from Arris and Harmonic for its SDV deployments, as well as some of BigBand’s SDV technologies.
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