Cable Onda employs Elemental solutions to power unified headend

Cable Onda Employs Full Suite of Elemental Solutions to Power Unified Headend

PORTLAND, Ore. — Elemental Technologies, the leader in software-defined video solutions, today announced that it will power a unified video headend built by Cable Onda, a Panamanian pay TV leader. Elemental will facilitate a consistent user experience across Cable Onda broadband networks as well as help Cable Onda provide consumers with access to catch up-TV, networked PVR applications and video-on-demand (VOD) services. Elemental solutions will also prepare the company for future 4K video offerings.

Founded 35 years ago, Cable Onda is among the largest pay TV service providers in Panama. It recently added over-the-top (OTT) and mobile content delivery to its portfolio of television, internet and telephony services. Now, with its new unified headend, Cable Onda will provide a single, high-quality user interface across all of its platforms. With increasing competition from multinational service providers, the Panamanian media company looks to further differentiate with compelling content, comprehensive service offerings and high picture quality.

“Our business requirement was to offer innovative services to every device, along with lower cost of operation and simple and secure management tools,” said Michael Maduro, Vice President of Strategic Projects for Cable Onda. “Elemental could demonstrate precisely what we were looking for and worked well with our engineering and integration team, and with other technology partners.

“The result is the most modern unified headend in the region, achieving our vision of a next-generation subscriber experience that retains and builds on our already loyal audience, engaging them over HFC, OTT and mobile,” Maduro added.

The new unified headend, built in-house by Cable Onda engineers, employs Elemental Live with Statistical Multiplexing capabilities and Elemental Server encoding and file-based appliances as well as Elemental Conductor for system management. Content will be delivered across the Cable Onda hybrid fiber-coaxial (HFC) cable television network to homes and over broadband networks and mobile devices for TV Everywhere OTT services. Additionally, high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) compliant Elemental Live systems allow Cable Onda to add 4K services apace with market demand. As part of the project, Cable Onda will offer a new set-top box to its subscribers, which will provide seamless access to extended services.