OREANDA-NEWS. September 13, 2010. COMSTAR – United TeleSystems (JSC COMSTAR-UTS, LSE: CMST), the leading supplier of integrated telecommunication solutions in Russia and the CIS announces the commercial launch of its new value-added service for digital interactive TV (IPTV) subscribers in Moscow – ‘TV Pause’.

 “TV Pause” is an option for subscribers to pause live TV broadcast being watched. In April COMSTAR-UTS started testing of this service and, as a result of this process, a decision was taken to launch the service on a commercial basis. At the moment, the service is available for more than 120 thousand MTS STREAM digital IP TV subscribers in Moscow.

 “Now our subscribers have an option to press ‘Pause’ button while watching live TV program. This service is only available with interactive TV, such as MTS STREAM IP TV. Thanks to COMSTAR new services our viewers have a chance to make a multimedia centre of their own at home, completely customized according to user personal needs. In addition, most of the value-added services are covered by a monthly fee which is not altered, regardless of the service activation. Our goal is to bring new users and to enhance loyalty of our current subscribers at the expense of such attractive offers", Maxim Chernov, JSC COMSTAR-UTS Marketing Director, said.

To provide the service, COMSTAR has installed special ‘Edgeware’ software package on its Moscow broadband access network, i.e. server farm with EEPROM flash memory to deploy ‘Video-on-Demand’, ‘TV Pause’, and ‘Time shifted TV’ services in IPTV networks, as well as server content distribution system. As a result, an operator may now locate servers in the vicinity of users for the content to be ‘recorded’ (cache-written) into hardware memory.

In-depth Info: IPTV based service makes it possible for the value-added services, such as ‘Video-on-Demand’, ‘TV RE-BROADCAST’, ‘STREAM.Photo’, ‘Picture-in-Picture’, ‘STREAM.Route’ informers from Yandex.TrafJams’, ‘STREAM.WeathReport’, ‘STREAM.CurrExchange’, etc. to be provided. Besides, COMSTAR allows watching TV on PC screen, broadcasts high-definition TV (HDTV) and allows to manage content via EPG, electronic TV guide.