Taiwan Cable Operator KBRO Launches HD Services Highlighting Alticast's MHP Solution

Monday, August 11th, 2008
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SEOUL, Korea — Alticast, the primary DVB-MHP solution provider for kbro Company Ltd., a leading Taiwan cable operator, announced today that it has successfully passed all Site Acceptance Tests (SAT) for the implementation of MHP based interactive TV and is ready to commercially deploy the first set-top boxes in Taiwan.

Targeting the commercialization of HD services during the Beijing Olympics in August, kbro, which has 1.2 million subscribers and controls approximately 25% of the Taiwanese cable TV market share, has selected Alticast as its predominant technology provider for its middleware, head-end system and EPG. Kbro has also selected Prime (Taiwan) and Hyundai Digital Technology (Korea) for its digital broadcast receivers, and Nagravision for it conditional access system (CAS).

With this recent collaboration, kbro has become a pioneer of the digital television industry in Taiwan and has firmly positioned itself at the forefront of the country’s television landscape. Inspired by the completion of SAT and MHP service roll-out, kbro has future plans to offer subscribers additional interactive services which include Pay-per-view (PPV), Video-on-demand (VOD) and Personal Video Recorder (PVR) by year end.

“We are very excited about this first successful commercial launch. I would like to thank Alticast for their dedication and unsparing effort to complete this project on schedule even under high pressure for time and for providing us with the stable and compelling platform,” said Mr. CH Jih, Senior Vice President and Head of Technology at kbro Co., Ltd. “The system functioned just as it was supposed to function, and it was extremely easy for us to build our new HD services on Alticast’s middleware.”

As a major Taiwanese cable operator, kbro is a member of the Cable Broadband Institute in Taiwan (CBIT). CBIT represents Taiwan’s leading cable operators, broadband providers, content suppliers, and regulators and elected political leaders. This achievement is expected to serve as an example to other CBIT members that have plans to develop or commercialize digital broadcasting and interactive TV services based on DVB-MHP and to accelerate the service launch of other major MSO’s that Alticast is currently under negation with.