As many of you speculated, the MegaQ was an April Fools' Day joke by Ceton, and we aren’t currently developing a "MegaQ" unit... for consumers. It was interesting to see how many customers have an unquenchable thirst for TV recording, and were hopeful that it was indeed a real product. That said, we are continuing to develop Q and are filled with excitement as we anticipate its launch.

The technology that inspired the article is actually a real product (and that was a real picture if it), and is shipping today. This device, called UCrypt (TM), is a product powered by Ceton technology and marketed by ATX Networks.

Supplying TV to over half a million screens today, UCrypt is the premier product in the category of products known as a bulk transition solution, and was designed to fill an unmet need for the hospitality industry and other bulk accounts. These are typically businesses that need to deliver TV to anywhere from dozens to hundreds of TVs in a single location, like hotels, stadiums, hospitals, etc. Many of these organizations are use to running what effectively amounts to a small cable TV system for their customers – cherry-picking channels for their customers to receive, inserting their own local channels, and otherwise offering a lineup which differs from the cable TV lineup in the area.

For many of these customers, the transition to High-Definition has been a difficult one. Initially, the only solution available -- to tune each channel with a cable box, then re-digitize and re-compress -- was energy-inefficient, expensive, error prone and bulky. A solution for a typical hotel could easily consume two six-foot tall equipment racks. While there are a few QAM modulators with integrated MPEG2 encoders on the market that support 720p and 1080i input, these solutions cause quality loss due to the decompression and recompression, not to mention they still have the same issues of being bulky, expensive, and error-prone.

UCrypt solves these problems by processing up to 60 HD channels in a single 3U rack-mount chassis, with no quality loss as the signals are never decompressed. For flexibility, UCrypt supports both QAM and IP input and output, and also supports Pro:Idiom encryption for protecting content. Using Ceton technology, UCrypt can tune up to 60 QAM tuners simultaneously, and up to 10 CableCARDs, each decrypting up to 6 streams. Integrated QAM modulators support distributing programs across up to 32 output QAMs.

For more information on UCrypt, please see ATX’s product page at http://atxnetworks.com/cable_tv_products/mdu_solutions/bulk-qam-to-qam-gige-analog-mdu