Cable-Tec Expo: Deluxe Pumps Up Sales Pitch For Multiscreen VOD Service

Orlando -- Deluxe Entertainment Services Group has bulked up sales and marketing for its managed video encoding and distribution service for cable operators, which it touts as providing 40,000 on-demand movie and TV show assets -- available in more than 50 formats for multiple devices.

The company’s Deluxe On Demand has already launched with “major distributors” in the U.S., including over-the-top aggregators, said Chris Rittler, senior vice president of Deluxe Digital Distribution, declining to identify them.

“We’ve been engaged in the sell side for the last year, and now we’re really expanding the marketing of it,” Rittler said. “What we are doing is raising awareness in the cable industry and overall to the MVPDs [multichannel video programming distributors].”

MSOs and other customers select the portion of content they’ve negotiated rights for, and Deluxe handles all the ingest, content processing, digital rights management and distribution requirements.

With the Deluxe service, video can be delivered through the service provider’s network or directly to the customer for multiscreen viewing. The VOD assets are encoded “into every format imaginable,” Rittler said, for Android and iOS smartphones all the way up to MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 set-tops.

Rittler said one of the key selling points for Deluxe On Demand is quality. “We start with mezzanine files and we apply our quality encoding processes to bring our capabilities to bear on that,” he said.

The catalog “really covers everything you can find on cable VOD and over-the-top systems,” Rittler said, including transactional VOD, free VOD, movies and TV episodes in the rental window and premium services.

Deluxe uses video encoders and DRM technologies from several different vendors. Rittler declined to name any of the company’s technology partners.

“The key thing for cable is enabling a large catalog of high-quality content that can reach all these devices,” Rittler said.

Burbank, Calif.-based Deluxe Entertainment Services Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings. The company provides production, post-production, digital distribution, marketing services and asset management for movies, TV and commercials.