Terayon Communication Systems and nCUBE have completed a seamless insertion of high definition (HD) advertisements into HDTV programming. At several upcoming cable industry events, the companies will demonstrate their HD ad insertion system, which is based on the Digital Program Insertion (DPI) technology standards developed by the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE). The SCTE's DPI standards were developed to enable cable operators to insert standard definition (SD) digital ads into their SD digital programming.
At press time, the HD ad insertion system had operated continuously for more than five days, with frame-accurate HD ads inserted every two minutes into an HDTV stream without error. The system is composed of Terayon's new DM 6400 Network CherryPicker and nCUBE's DPI Premium System, which stores advertisements in a digital format. When signaled, DPI Premium delivers the ad to the CherryPicker, which synchronizes the bit rate of the ad with the bit rate of the program and then "splices" the ad into the program. The HD content used in the demonstration was provided by HEURIS, developer of the MPEG Power Professional MPEG encoder.
