Advanced Television

Imagine Communications enters TV Anywhere market with ICE Streaming System

June 14, 2011

Imagine Communications, an innovator in advanced digital video solutions, has announced the ICE Streaming System , Imagine’s new video processing platform allowing service providers to deliver uncompromised video quality across multiple viewing devices, with unmatched compression efficiency. The product is currently in beta testing with several North American service providers. Imagine will be publicly demonstrating the ICE Streaming System for the first time at NCTA’s The Cable Show in Chicago, June 14-16 in booth #ES-55.

The ICE Streaming System is based on Imagine’s widely deployed ICE Video Platform, which today serves thousands of live streams to over half of all US digital cable subscribers and is recognized as the industry’s most powerful multi-codec, multi-rate, multi-resolution video processing platform. A fully integrated, high-density solution, the ICE Streaming System boasts support for up to 1000 stream-aligned multi-profile transcodes from a single carrier-class blade system platform.

“TV Anywhere is without question the application getting attention and an important growth market for Imagine,” said Imagine’s CEO Richard Stanfield. “We’re excited to bring this uniquely flexible, scalable and powerful new platform to market at the perfect time for our service provider customers to respond to the large and growing subscriber demand.”

By leveraging the ICE Video Platform architecture, the ICE Streaming System combines leading picture quality and unlimited scalability with full support for integrated fragmentation, encryption and HTTP Streaming. “The ICE Streaming System allows our customers to offer a virtually unlimited number streams with the best picture quality and bandwidth efficiency,” said Imagine’s VP of Product Marketing Chris Gordon. “The ICE Streaming System is yet another application to run on our carrier-class Blade System, enabling our customers to deploy multi-screen services on the same high availability platforms they’ve come to trust for industry-leading HD and SD broadcast transcoding.”

The ICE Streaming System’s many features and benefits include:

Quality of Experience – Through advanced quality monitoring, feature detection and spatial-temporal structure detection, the ICE Streaming System uniquely transcodes from any input resolution to any output resolution while maintaining the precise ratio of quality to bit rate.

High Density, Unlimited Scalability – Transcodes up to 1000 output profiles from a single blade-system platform. The distributed architecture enables an unlimited number of output profiles for any source stream with guaranteed alignment. The system’s pure IP/Linux architecture is unparalleled in configuration flexibility and simplified system maintenance.

Resolution and Transcoding Flexibility – Supports any-resolution video transcoding and any-codec audio transcoding, Apple HLS, Adobe Zeri or Microsoft Silverlight streaming, with multi-network adaptation and multi-platform deployment options.

Mobile and Internet De-Interlacing – Converting HDTV 1080i signals for the progressive displays of PCs, tablets and smartphones is a critical new requirement to ensuring consistently high quality across all viewing devices. The ICE platform’s hybrid architecture differentiates itself from competing solutions through Motion Adaptive Pixel Accurate (MAPA) de-interlacing technology, guaranteeing the highest picture quality for all screens.

Service Reliability & Future-proofing – High-availability redundancy clustering and fully programmable system components make the Imagine ICE Streaming System the most reliable and future-proof internet and mobile video platform available today. Available in AC, DC or NEBS certified hardware, the Imagine ICE Streaming System extends service uptime through carrier-class hardware design and automatic service protection.

Categories: Press Releases, Video