Products / Services

Massillon’s Hockey Fan Subscribers Can Catch All the NHL Action, No Matter Where it Happens

Sherman Oaks, CA, October 18, 2010 - Avail-TVN, the largest digital media services company in North America, is making it easy for NHL fans to watch their favorite teams and players, no matter where they live. Avail-TVN affiliate Massillon Cable TV is now providing customers with access to NHL® Center Ice®, giving package subscribers access to out-of-market games not carried by national or regional networks and enabling fans to follow their favorite teams, no matter where they live.

The NHL Center Ice package includes 12 SD channels and two full-time HD channels, offering up to four NHL games in HD per weeknight, with more content available on the weekends. The package also features a Stats Channel with statistics, scores, game previews and schedule information and a Mosaic Channel featuring a rotating mosaic of six screens displaying different live-action games being played.

“We love hockey in central Ohio and NHL’s Center Ice is a great service for our subscribers,” said Robert Gessner, President, Massillon Cable TV. “We are delighted that Avail-TVN is now offering sports packages and that we can take advantage of their state-of-the-art MPEG-4 delivery which saves us bandwidth while preserving a great consumer viewing experience.”

Avail-TVN supports both MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 delivery of SD and HD channels for out-of-market sports. The flexible design of the Avail-TVN Media Platform includes an optional transcoding capability to ensure that all content can be delivered from the Media Platform in the format required by each affiliate customer.

“We are leveraging the new capabilities of our single Super Head End facility, hybrid distribution architecture, and storage infrastructure to introduce NHL Center Ice to our affiliates,” said Doug Sylvester, chief strategy officer at Avail-TVN. “Our next generation platform enables us to offer advanced services for Center Ice, including an increased number of HD channels and access to all NHL Center Ice games; in addition, Avail-TVN also will be able to provide quick turn-around of NHL game highlights for next day availability on-demand.”

Avail-TVN is the largest digital media services company in North America. Working with every major studio and television network, the company offers a full content line-up of MPEG-4 encoded live programming as well as video on demand content in MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 to multichannel video providers throughout the US, Canada, the Caribbean and Mexico. The Avail-TVN platform is an open, advanced technology, offering the most comprehensive, end-to-end solution for licensing, managing, distributing and marketing linear and on-demand content to virtually any platform today and is extensible to support the new services of tomorrow. For more information, please visit avail-tvn.com.

Throughout the regular season, NHL Center Ice provides fans the opportunity to watch up to 1,000 live NHL out-of-market games, many of which will be offered in High-Definition. Select games from the Stanley Cup Playoffs also will be available. All games subject to local blackout and other restrictions. For more information on NHL Center Ice, log on to NHL.com/centerice.

NHL, the NHL Shield, the word mark and image of the Stanley Cup and Center Ice name and logo are registered trademarks and The Game Lives Where You Do is a trademark of the National Hockey League. All Rights Reserved.