Cablevision Unveils iPad App

BETHPAGE: Cablevision Systems Corp.’s new Optimum App allows subscribers to access the company’s digital cable service—including hundreds of channels, plus VOD—on an iPad in the home.

Cablevision says that the app delivers the "full cable television experience" to the iPad, with the device functioning as a television. The app delivers 300 live channels and access to VOD. Programming is fully searchable, including by genre, and the application includes the ability to schedule DVR recordings and manage previously-recorded content.

"This application allows the iPad to function as a television, delivering the full richness and diversity of our cable television service to a display device in the home," said Tom Rutledge, Cablevision’s COO. "It gives our customers the additional flexibility and convenience of watching television throughout the home, in places where set-top boxes might not be ideal or even practical, like the kitchen, bathroom or work room.  This is the future of advanced digital cable televisions served with virtual set-top boxes, and just one of many digital displays we are going to be serving through a variety of applications."

The platform says it is using its secure and proprietary advanced digital cable television network, not the Internet, to deliver content to the iPad. "Cablevision has the right to distribute programming over its cable system to iPads configured in this way under its existing distribution agreements with programming providers," the platform says. "Customers do not need to have Internet access to use the Optimum App for iPad."

Time Warner Cable recently ran into problems over its iPad app, with several channel operators claiming the platform doesn’t have the rights to stream channels to the the device. The platform subsequently removed a host of networks from its app.