CopperGate and Ucentric team up for home IP network entertainment applications solution

CopperGate Communications, a developer of chipset solutions for home networking, and Ucentric Systems, a leading provider of home media networking software for the digital home, has announced a joint Internet Protocol (IP) network solution for delivering whole-home entertainment applications using existing coaxial cable and phone lines. CopperGate's CopperStream technology, in production today, has been integrated with Ucentric's Whole-Home Media Software Suite to enable a highly reliable IP network capable of distributing high-definition (HD) and standard definition (SD) broadcast quality video sessions.

The resulting system is ideally suited to Ucentric's highly popular Whole-Home DVR (digital video recording) application, Whole-Home Music, and distribution of photos to multiple display devices throughout the home. The integrated solution, which enables telco and satellite service providers to significantly cut consumer premises equipment and installation costs while increasing entertainment service offerings, will be featured at the upcoming International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2005 in Las Vegas, January 6-9.

"Ucentric has built a home entertainment platform that greatly enhances the consumer's digital home entertainment experience, and at a cost that operators and manufacturers can easily adopt," said Gabi Hilevitz, CopperGate CEO. "We are pleased to work with them to deliver a flexible system that uses a high speed IP backbone in the house to deliver high quality video, data and voice services on a secure and dependable network."

CopperGate's CopperStream products can carry 128 megabits per second of data over both coaxial cables and phone lines with up to 90% user data throughput. Guaranteed QoS provided by Automatic Bandwidth Allocation (ABA) ensures delivery of data streams with predefined bandwidth, latency and jitter. These products are the first to comply with the HomePNA 3.0 specification, an extension of HomePNA 2, an ITU Standard.

"CopperGate's industry-leading home networking products allow the distribution of multiple broadcast quality HD video streams--the essential and most difficult challenge for physical layer technologies to meet--over combined phoneline/coax networks. The availability of a mature, cost-efficient technology to support multi-session HD is a significant enabler for the New Digital Home," said Michael Collette, Ucentric chief executive officer. "Our combined IP-based system for the Digital Home can now deliver a future-proof solution that meets today's requirement and is built to expand to allow providers to support growing consumer demand for applications and services in the home that require this sort of bandwidth."

Ucentric's Whole-Home DVR application creates a single recording library, shared among multiple television sets that allows users to independently record, pause, play, rewind and fast forward live or recorded programming from any TV in the network. Additional applications available from Ucentric include Whole-Home Music and Whole-Home Photo applications that allow users to access, share, and transfer their complete digital music and photo collections to any connected device in the home.

Ucentric is a provider of networked media server software and applications for the new digital home. Its patented technology enables the secure, high quality digital distribution of HD and SD video signals from broadcast, satellite or cable sources to all connected rooms in the home. The Ucentric solution is uniquely capable of unifying networked television, including whole-home DVR with networked personal media (music, photos, home movies) and networked communications (broadband internet access and telephony)--all on a standards-based, cost efficient, interoperable IP networking platform that can easily scale to support any array of applications.