Digicable, India’s second biggest cable operator, reportedly chose French video compression solution provider ATEME’s transcoding platform, TITAN, as the pay TV operator intensifies its effort to gain a larger share of the Indian market.

The news comes amid growing rumors that Digicable may merge with Den Networks, who has a 50-50 joint venture with News Corp's Star TV Group, Star DEN, formed in 2008.

“TITAN is not costly and supports our future needs,” said Digicable’s chief technology officer Asif Khan.

Launched in 2009, TITAN is a scalable video processing platform that allows for large amounts of parallel content transcoding while maintaining close levels of fidelity to original sources.

According to ATEME, the platform has already delivered linear channels, Video-On-Demand or Catch Up TV services that provide material to TVs, PCs, tablets and smartphones to over 70 million international subscribers.

Through TITAN, Digicable can now edit videos separately for PCs, tablets and smartphones.

The cable operator said the platform also helps assemble multiple tapes of long feature films into single VOD files. The ATEME’s platform also supports editing tasks such as trimming and file concatenation to join multiple sequences.

The Paris-based firm stated these features have popularized its platform in the cable market.

Digicable caters to millions of subscribers in as many as 46 cities and has about 28,000km of optical fibre cable in the country. The operator recently announced its plans to install a 500 channel headend ahead of the country's move to cable TV digitization, beginning with the four major metros on 1 July 2012.

Analysts say the move to digitize cable TV network is expected to provide a boost for the state economy, consumer choice, broadcasters' revenues, cable and direct to home (DTH) subscriptions and investment opportunity.