ANGA reflects the growing interest in RDK for Europe

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    With support building for RDK, the Comcast-inspired cable initiative to get next-generation customer premise equipment to market faster, and with Liberty Global and Kabel Deutschland among its European backers, this technology will be among the key areas of interest at ANGA COM this week in Cologne.

    Pace will be showcasing its RDK products and solutions including media servers, IP clients and dongles, along with its Elements RDK-ready software platform. “Pace has been at the forefront of RDK-based product development from the beginning, working in partnership with leading operators with their RDK product roll-outs across North America,” the company notes. “Having shipped over 3 million RDK compliant devices in the United States alone, we are now planning to expand our RDK product deployments into the European market and beyond.”
     
    Espial is among the supporters of RDK. The company says momentum is building for RDK across the cable industry. It says it is becoming clear that RDK promises to bring transparency to the set-top box software stack and allow operators to achieve Web speed development with HTML5, and that the initiative therefore has broad industry support.

    “It has only been a couple of years since Comcast started work on a common framework for set-top boxes which would become RDK. The intent of this approach was to separate hardware and software while also making software and service platforms hardware agnostic.
    The benefits of this were to improve service innovation and achieve quicker time to market across multiple STB platforms,” Espial explains. “This initiative has now spread across the global cable community with support announced by Liberty Global, Time Warner Cable, Kabel Deutschland and many other operators and vendors.”

    Espial, which is exhibiting at ANGA COM this week, has embraced RDK and has built its products to be fully compatible with it. It has also established itself as an integrator to extend the benefits of RDK with its software products, including its applications framework and HTML5 user experience, with the aim being to radically transform the consumer’s STB viewing experience.

    Meanwhile, leading European operators and RDK Management LLC will be participating in the conference session entitled, ‘Accelerating the Next Generation of Video Services: RDK and Recommendation Engines and Beyond’, which is on Wednesday, May 21st at 2:00 p.m. Speakers include : Wolfgang Zeller, VP Service Engineering, Kabel Deutschland; Bill Warga, VP Technology, Liberty Global; John Maguire, Director of Strategy and Marketing for TV Technology, S3 Group; and Peter Docherty, Founder & CTO, ThinkAnalytics. The session will be moderated by Steve Heeb, President and General Manager of the RDK Management, LLC.

    The RDK is a pre-integrated software bundle that provides a common framework for powering customer-premises equipment (CPE) from TV service providers, including set-top boxes (STBs), gateways, and converged devices. It was created to accelerate the deployment of next-gen video products and services. It enables TV service providers to standardize certain elements of these devices, but also easily customize the applications and user experiences that ride on top.

    To date, the RDK has been licensed by more than 15 operators globally. The RDK has more than 140 licensees including CE manufacturers, SoC vendors, software developers, system integrators and of course the TV service providers.


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