Optimum Lightpath Managed Video Offers Easy Path for Content Creators

By Carolyn Braff
The video-service industry offers a myriad of options for delivering video to end users, but the creators and producers of that video have thus far been left out of the equation. To fill that gap, Optimum Lightpath has introduced Lightpath Managed Video, an Ethernet-based transport service that allows video experts to worry about their video content, not the expertise required to convert the video between formats.
This service is meant to help the content-production environment, allow them to leverage economies that weren t there, and change the paradigm of the video-service delivery, explains Glenn Calafati, director of product development at Optimum Lightpath. Based on what you need, we can advise you towards the bit rate, work with you and your application to find a right-size solution, and take some of the complexity that s involved in this out of the equation.
The Managed Video service relies on relatively simple Carrier-class Ethernet technology.
It s sort of a stepping stone to an all-IP delivery of native video, Calafati says. With this offering, not only can regular voice and data applications be presented to the production facilities of these venues, but we can also use that infrastructure while leveraging the guaranteed bandwidth characteristics of a next-generation Ethernet bandwidth.
Managed Video provides connectivity as well as encoding and decoding of digital video specifically for high-resolution, broadcast-quality video applications. The service accepts the native digital video signal directly from a camera s output, converts it to Ethernet, transports it across the network, and decodes it back to an electrical video interface, with a redundant protected connection, in a number of formats, including ASI, SD-SDI, and HD-SDI.
As far as the end user is concerned, Calafati explains, it s like a big cable that you re able to extend the video service from across a wide-area network.
With Cablevision standing by as a watchful parent company, Optimum Lightpath has had plenty of input from the sports world. Sports teams are a part of the Cablevision family, and working with them to understand their needs is a huge value to us, Calafati says. We now understand some of the applications and the solutions that it actually brings to them.
In venues looking to move content wirelessly to interact with data applications within the stadium environment, for example, the Managed Video service can be particularly helpful.
This brings the video into that LAN and data-type technology that is common, Calafati says. There are plenty of ways in an IP package that video can be moved by infrastructure that is standard to just moving data around a venue.
Lightpath Managed Video service is the newest addition to Optimum Lightpath s Video Services Portfolio, which also includes Lightpath Video Transport, a dedicated Layer 2 point-to-point service designed for broadcast-quality video transport.