Harmonic today announced a partnership with the National Cable Television Cooperative to give NCTC member operators access to its CableOS virtualized cable access solution.
NCTC’s more than 750 independent member cable operators can now get a “cost-effective” solution for moving their broadband services off of CMTS platforms and onto cloud-native DOCSIS 3.1 networks.
1Tennessee, Buckeye Broadband, Comporium, Hilliary Communications and TVS Cable are all currently underway with CableOS deployments and, as NCTC points out, making the switch is about more broadband capacity and increased reliability for streaming video services.
"NCTC members connect customers and businesses from their hometowns to the world, and broadband speed and capacity is vital to their success," said Rich Fickle, president and CEO of NCTC, in a statement. "Harmonic's cost-effective approach to virtualizing the cable access architecture will allow small- and midsized members to have a viable choice for increasing their broadband capacity and deploying a competitive, high-speed internet offering, while ensuring they provide reliable streaming video services."
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Yaniv Ben-Soussan, vice president of sales, North America Cable, for Harmonic, echoed that statement.
"Independent cable operators want to provide more bandwidth to be competitive in the market. 1 Gig services accomplish this goal and is made possible through migration to DOCSIS 3.1. What is driving this demand, is the need to be competitive with tier-1 MSOs, the growing consumption of online video through services such as Netflix and YouTube, as well as the migration of tier-2 and tier-3 operators to IP video," Ben-Soussan said.
The Harmonic agreement arrives about one year after NCTC’s deal with MobiTV, which specializes in IP/app-based solutions for video delivery. When the deal was announced in late 2017, Fickle said that “live, on-demand, and local content delivered through robust, consumer-friendly applications is the future of television.”
“We reviewed proposals from 20 different companies and found MobiTV further ahead and more nimble than most of the other choices,” said Fickle. “Our members generally respond to consumer needs quicker than the largest companies in our industry. Clearly app-based delivery leveraging IP technology is where the video business model is heading.”
NCTC members All West Communication and Fidelity Communications are among the 50 U.S. pay TV operators that MobiTV said last summer are using its platform.