We received some great news here at RGB over the weekend – our Video Multiprocessing Gateway (VMG) has won the overall accolade at this year’s SCTE awards, securing the title of Technological Innovation of the Year.

Not only has the VMG been singled out for its technological innovation within the overall broadband arena, it was also crowned the Best Digital Processing Solution for its unique ability to simultaneously deliver advanced MPEG-2 and MPEG-4/H.264 video services from a highly flexible platform. The VMG’s continued success is due to its ability to address the operational complexity associated with delivering today’s advanced video services, as well as the transition to a ‘three screens’ environment.

Judging was conducted by an independent panel of industry experts and winners were announced at the SCTE Gala Awards Dinner on Saturday 24th April.

If you want to see the multi-award winning VMG in action, we will be demonstrating the product at ANGA Cable next week (4-6 May, Cologne, Germany). Come and visit us at stand B50, where RGB executives will be on hand to talk you through the award winning attributes of the VMG.

RGB continues to expand our offering for video service providers around the globe. Today we announced bitmap-based subtitling capabilities for our Simulcast Edge Processor (SEP), which is especially relevant for our growing Latin American customer base. SCTE-27-based subtitles use a bitmap technique that enables support for subtitling in any language. The subtitle author is given complete control over the appearance of the characters and where they will appear on the screen. And with the SEP acting as a decoder, no set-top box is required to support this functionality. Today this capability allows operators to localize their programming by displaying subtitles in any languages available in the programming.

But I wonder what other opportunities this might open up for operators. With the ability to support the bitmap format, there is now the potential to deliver a variety of other images to subscribers, including service announcements, logos/branding and regional advertising.

What do you think? What applications would you like to deliver through your edge decoder?