Those of you who visited with us at IBC last month got the first peek at our new Enhanced Video Intelligence Architecture (eVIA) ecosystem for the delivery and monetization of multiscreen IP video services. This first-of-its-kind architecture, incorporating adaptive bitrate ad insertion for hyper-targeting, gained significant attention from operators.

With TelcoTV 2011 marking eVIA’s debut on this side of the pond, we expect to have some interesting conversations with telecom operators in New Orleans this week.

And never a company to rest on our laurels, we’re enhancing our multiscreen solution for our North American customers by working with itaas, a well-established system integrator, and Verimatrix, a specialist in securing and enhancing revenue for multiscreen digital TV services. With extensive expertise and best-of-breed products, together we’re offering a TV Everywhere solution that allows service providers to quickly and cost-effectively deploy a complete multiscreen IP video service for streaming live video to any device, without the headache of piecing it together on their own. We’ll be giving a demonstration of this solution at our booth—#233—at TelcoTV.

We invite you stop by to learn how you can easily transition your network for the delivery of any video to any device. And if you need more motivation, we can offer you a cocktail (or two) during the booth crawl, starting at 4:30 on Wednesday, October 26. We look forward to seeing you.

As we head into TelcoTV this week, we’re very pleased to share the news that our eVIA multiscreen IP video solution is a finalist for a TelcoTV Vision Award for Innovation in Video Processing. At RGB we never stop innovating and this is proven out by our shortlisting in this category for the third straight year. Winners will be announced during the general session on Wednesday.

If you’re attending the show, please stop by our booth—#233—for a demonstration. We look forward to seeing you in New Orleans!

Believe it or not, cable vendors have their own “Oscars”—or at least that’s how we think of Broadband Technology Report’s prestigious annual Diamond Technology Reviews. Much like the esteemed “Academy”, the “Diamonds” are judged by a distinguished panel of senior executives and lead engineers from major cable operators—key decision makers who have deployed cable equipment in the real world.

For this year’s Diamond competition, RGB submitted two recently upgraded products for review. First was the latest addition to our industry-leading Video Multiprocessing Gateway line—the VMG-8. As operators scramble to deploy and enhance their TV Everywhere services—expanding their delivery of video content to a plethora of mobile devices—they find the VMG’s mix of density, capacity, scalability and a rich feature set well–suited to their growing multiscreen requirement. Like its family members, the VMG-8 is a highly reliable, future-proof transcoding platform capable of performing the range of codec, format and resolutions changes required to deliver video to any device over any network with pristine picture quality.

We also entered the VMG’s companion product, the TransAct Packager, our advanced adaptive streaming solution which segments and packages MPEG-4/H.264 streams into the Apple, Microsoft and Adobe HTTP streaming formats. Praised by our customers as a very unique offering, the TransAct Packager is also leading the way into a new world of hyper-targeted IP ad insertion—ad placement localized down to not just a neighborhood, but to an individual, which, as we’ve talked about, represents higher potential revenue for video service providers everywhere.

The BTR Diamond judges awarded the VMG-8 4 Diamonds and the TransAct Packager received a nearly as impressive 3.5 Diamonds. With all the Diamonds our award-winning products have racked up over the years, our trophy case is starting to look almost as impressive as Steven Spielberg’s mantle. However, we’re proud to say that our VMG/TransAct Packager combination doesn’t just look good on the red carpet—as our many customers will attest, it will deliver in your network as well.

So, before we thank the Academy, we’d like to invite you to learn more at the upcoming TelcoTV and Cable-Tec Expo trade shows. Please stop by our booths for a demonstration.

It’s no secret cable operators have long earned important supplemental revenue by inserting local and zoned ads into their programming. In most cases, such local commercials have been delivered in a less than targeted approach—the same ad sent to a fairly broad audience, with only a region or neighborhood in common. In turn, many smaller businesses have been repeatedly scared away from cable, uncertain of the cost-effectiveness of buying multiple ad spots in such a wide viewing area.

For years, operators have dreamed of ways to streamline ad insertion through a virtual microscope—from a region, to a city, to a neighborhood, to ads specifically tailored to the individual viewer (dog food ads for dog owners!). But it just wasn’t feasible within the broadcast environment…at least not without spending enough to send astronauts back to the moon (or close anyway).

But as more of the well-heeled consumers that advertisers dream of use smartphones and iPads and other devices for viewing IP video, operators now see hyper-targeting—a one-on-one relationship with the end user—as the lucrative future of ad insertion. Have you ever Googled “Acapulco” when planning a vacation and later noticed the subtle appearance of banner ads for attractive coastal destinations in Mexico as you surf the web? Similar concept.

How can IP-based ads be targeted so precisely? In short, today’s IP video utilizes adaptive HTTP streaming—downloading to the client a sequence of video files (or “chunks”) of network content recorded at different bitrates and resolutions to compensate for the routine variations in network bandwidth. This method offers much more flexibility than the standard broadcast infrastructure, and in concert with the aforementioned direct consumer relationship, allows the operator to insert tailored video ads in a similar fashion to Internet advertising—influenced by clear-cut demographics and viewing patterns.

The result: The advertiser gets the highest possible “bang for the buck” with a laser focus to their target market. The viewer in turn is allowed to “cut through the clutter”—eliminating irrelevant commercials in favor of specific ads best suited to their individual interests. And the video service provider reaps the added revenue from perhaps the most effective advertising in the Digital Age. Call it a “triple win.”

For more information on how you can achieve your quest for the Holy Grail of advertising, download our white paper now and visit with us at TelcoTV and Cable-Tec Expo.

It’s been quite a year here at RGB as we’ve significantly expanded our presence in the IP video market—adding dozens of new customers for our multiscreen IP video solutions, announcing new capabilities to enhance our offerings in this area, expanding our global reach, and continuing to receive accolades from industry experts for the innovation of our products—including our recent inclusion on Streaming Media’s List of the 100 Companies that Matter Most in Online Video.

The icing on the cake this year is making the finalist list for Light Reading’s Leading Lights Award for Private Company of the Year. This truly is a prestigious award recognizing “…the privately held firm that stands out among its competitors, innovates constantly, makes investors proud and makes employees happy,” and RGB’s inclusion highlights the strength of the path that we set out on several years ago to focus on the emerging IP video market. With our unique offering and the validation from many large, leading-edge video service providers in the US, Canada and around the globe, we believe the best is yet to come as multiscreen IP video becomes a mainstream offering in the coming year.

We look forward to the awards dinner on November 8 in New York City where Light Reading will recognize the telecommunications industry’s top public and private companies and their executives for their outstanding achievements in the industry. We already feel like a winner and appreciate the support of those inside and outside of RGB who have helped us to achieve such a great honor.

TelcoTV 2011 marks the tenth anniversary of the seminal tradeshow for telcos looking to get into video delivery. My, how things have certainly changed in a decade.

Back in 2001, if you wanted a multi-channel TV service from AT&T or Verizon you got a satellite dish bolted to the side of your house.

At the time, pundits argued the merits of these telecom giants vastly upgrading their networks to deliver video versus continuing their partnerships with the DBS giants–some loudly speculated that the telcos would simply acquire the satellite titans.

Taking the ‘build it and they will come’ mantra to heart, AT&T and Verizon set about upgrading their networks.

Today their gamble has paid off as subs have indeed come to their services—and in big numbers. At the end of Q1, Verizon ranked as the seventh largest multi-channel TV provider in the U.S. with 3.6 million subs and AT&T comes in at number nine with a not-too-shabby 3.2 million subs. Both offer a very competitive suite of live and on-demand programming in both SD and HD, complete with DVR service and typically bundled with much speedier DSL.

But the success of AT&T and Verizon is also shared by smaller telcos–often much smaller–that have taken advantage of new generations of video products utilizing the latest bandwidth-thrifty codecs.

We’re proud to say we’ve had a hand in this success. RGB’s solutions have helped the largest telcos, the smallest telcos, and many in between to deliver video services with pristine picture quality.

But like our telco customers, we’re not resting on our laurels.

TV Everywhere is the next hurdle for telcos and we’re further enhancing our award-winning multiscreen IP video solutions to enable telcos of all sizes to offer both live and on-demand programming on all screens with optimal picture quality. We’re taking these solutions a step further to enable the delivery of ads all the way down to the individual viewer. This ability to hyper-target ads represents a tremendous opportunity for telcos to generate substantial new revenues without requiring churn-inducing rate increases.

So, as awesome as the first 10 years of TelcoTV have been, they’re only setting the stage for the next decade. Stay tuned for more info to come as we kick off a series of blog postings leading up to TelcoTV 2011.

We look forward to seeing you later this month in New Orleans—stop by booth #233 to learn more about what we have in store as we enter TelcoTV’s second decade. Take a look here for a sneak peek of our demos and an opportunity to download our latest white papers on a variety of IP video topics.