SeaChange Touts ‘New Era’ in VOD Platform

Calling it a “new era in personal television,” SeaChange International introduced its latest VOD platform, calling it the only open VOD content delivery platform to bring social networking, time-shifting, advanced advertising and gaming to television.

Axiom On Demand 5.0 will be demonstrated for the first time at the Cable Show, May 18-20 in New Orleans.

Add-on applications include Affinity, ReStart TV, and Game Now Lite. The Affinity Web portal, branded either by SeaChange or by TV operators, lets subscribers use their mobile phone or PC to find content among thousands of on-demand titles and organize their on-demand experience. Affinity offers automated recommendations and also allows subscribers to share their own recommendations, searches, ratings and commentaries with friends and family through social networks such as Facebook and others.

ReStartTV lets viewers rewind, pause and re-start programs from the beginning—less than 10 seconds into a broadcast’s start, depending on the operator’s business rules and content contracts.

SeaChange supports stream-intensive time-shifting by pushing resources to the network edge with its Flash Memory Streamers, which are already being widely deployed by SeaChange customers to meet the growing “long tail” of content demand. Like the open Axiom On Demand platform, the ReStart TV application also supports third-party video pumps.

Game Now Lite, a game management and distribution system, operates on virtually any set-top box. SeaChange bundles content and licensing and includes game packs of ready-to-run favorites.

Axiom On Demand 5.0 is also the launching pad for SeaChange’s AdPulse VOD advertising software, giving operators the ability to monetize all of their VOD offerings, through dynamic and targeted insertion. AdPulse enables on-the-fly insertion of interior, pre- and post-roll ads into on-demand program streams in real time. Making ads independent of the programs in which they run allows each to be trafficked separately, SeaChange said, dramatically reducing lead times for ad copy and enabling ad rotation, targeting and message refresh throughout a campaign.