Heartland Cable, which serves a dozen rural communities in north central Illinois, is upgrading to digital with Pico Digital's CONDOR end-to-end headend broadcast cable TV system for small operators. Built and shipped as a turnkey system configured to the specific needs of the customer, the package includes digital headend gear, PVR set-top boxes and a content discovery/navigation system.
Heartland Cable is deploying CONDOR for new-build subscribers and is gradually expanding the system to include current customers who are receiving analog signals. CONDOR components purchased by Heartland Cable include a full headend, with an SD and HD encoder (SDQ6 and PD1000), mux scrambler edge QAM (IPQC), and Verimatrix conditional access. On the client side, Heartland is deploying Pico Digital VMX-1 set-top boxes.