Cisco Headend System Release 2.5 User Guide

4011043 Rev B 

Introducing Cisco’s OCAP Object Carousel Solution:  

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The TSBroadcaster 

 

The TSBroadcaster provides management, scheduling, and playout facilities for 

OCAP and Multimedia Home Platform (MHP) applications. The OCAP Object 

Carousel provides scheduled playout of the applications in fully formed Transport 

Streams that conform to OCAP standards. Optionally, you can inject local audio and 

video (A/V) content into the stream. The Transport Streams are played out through 

an ASI interface that may be connected directly to a modulator or fed into re-

multiplexing equipment. The TSBroadcaster provides a user interface (UI) for 

Transport Stream definition.  
The TSBroadcaster provides one or more digital storage media - command and 

control

 (

DSM-CC) object carousels in each Transport Stream and it allocates a 

maximum bandwidth for each carousel. The TSBroadcaster allows multiple 

applications to share an object carousel, and it allows each application to run in its 

own sub-directory. The TSBroadcaster dynamically manages the allocation of 

bandwidth for each application in the carousel. This approach optimizes carousel 

bandwidth usage and provides a robust transmission scheme that simplifies the 

management of downstream re-multiplexing. 
The TSBroadcaster provides a UI for “drag-and-drop” application construction and 

can be used with a wide range of application development environments, ranging 

from command-line compilers, through IDEs to specialized MHP and OCAP 

application development tools. 
The TSBroadcaster provides facilities to update applications while they are being 

played out.  The TSBroadcaster can poll and import data from the Internet to allow 

an application to receive updates automatically from FTP or Web sites, and it also 

provides a mechanism to update data in response to command driven updates.  

Updates can be applied to individual files, or whole directories can be updated in a 

single transaction. The TSBroadcaster provides a rapid update mechanism to 

minimize the latency of individual file updates, and it will automatically rebuild the 

carousel when it needs to change the carousel structure to accommodate updates. 

Changes in modules and the download information indication (DII) are tracked and 

their versions are incremented as required to signal updates efficiently. 
The TSBroadcaster provides support for inserting “do it now” stream events and 

provides a UI through which stream events may be inserted with the required data. 
You can deploy the TSBroadcaster in many different configurations to meet the 

requirements for distribution and resilience. You can use the TSBroadcaster to define 

the configuration that builds, updates, and delivers Transport Streams and out-of-

band (OOB) components to the required interfaces. The TSBroadcaster also allows 

you to back up and restore configurations.