Charter signs up with Ascent for VoD management

Charter Communications (Nasdaq: CHTR) has signed on with Ascent Media to manage and distribute video-on-demand content from a national technical facility in St. Louis out to regional Charter operations. As a result of the deal, all of Charter's VoD content will be funneled to the St. Louis operation where Ascent Media software will track it, manage its metadata and then send it to Charter's markets across the country.

"It eliminates the need for Charter to have a lot of infrastructure in each market, automates workflows and lets them add more content without adding as much cost as they would normally," said Rich Fickle, executive vice president of strategic development for Ascent.

Besides centralizing the VoD storage and processing, Ascent has installed edge catchers in each market to interface with VoD servers. Content that is fed over Charter's backbone is then caught, processed and forwarded from those points.

Using Ascent accelerates Charter's already aggressive VoD plans, said Doug Ike, vice president of advanced video and applications engineering at development at Charter. In a prepared statement, Ike said that Ascent "makes VoD delivery more efficient and provides more choice and value for our customers."

For more:
- see this news release

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