Major Cable Operators Sign Up for OCAP Technology Licenses

Wednesday, January 31st, 2007
Via Licensing logo

Louisville, Colorado — Major cable operators Comcast and Time Warner Cable have executed required agreements to license essential OpenCable™ Applications Platform (OCAP™) intellectual property and obtain security certificates for OCAP applications.

The agreements include a patent license from Via Licensing for essential patents required to implement OCAP. Via Licensing serves as the OCAP patent pool licensing administrator.

“This is an important and explicit endorsement of our OCAP strategy,” said Mark Coblitz, Senior Vice President for Strategic Planning at Comcast. “Executing the proper OCAP agreements is a necessary step in fulfilling legal obligations and signals the next step towards OCAP deployment,” he added.

Separately, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, and Charter have obtained OCAP code verification signing certificates from CableLabs. The certificates are used to sign and validate interactive OCAP applications running on their cable networks.

OCAP is the middleware specification CableLabs has established to enable application writers to create new interactive services that will run on a broad range of advanced digital set tops and cable-ready TVs.