BigBand Networks was a

corporation A corporation is an organization—usually a group of people or a company—authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law "born out of statute"; a legal person in legal context) and ...

headquartered in

Redwood City Redwood City is a city on the San Francisco Peninsula in Northern California's Bay Area, approximately south of San Francisco, and northwest of San Jose. Redwood City's history spans its earliest inhabitation by the Ohlone people to being a po ...

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

, that opened in 1999 and specialized in selling multimedia technologies to

cable television Cable television is a system of delivering television programming to consumers via radio frequency (RF) signals transmitted through coaxial cables, or in more recent systems, light pulses through fibre-optic cables. This contrasts with bro ...

multi-system operators. It had its

IPO An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment ...

on the Nasdaq in 2007, which was met with controversy when a

class-action lawsuit A class action, also known as a class-action lawsuit, class suit, or representative action, is a type of lawsuit where one of the parties is a group of people who are represented collectively by a member or members of that group. The class actio ...

alleged that the company violated the Securities Act of 1933. The company was acquired as a division within

Arris Group Arris International Limited (styled as ARRIS) is an American telecommunications equipment company engaged in data, video and telephony systems for homes and businesses. On April 4, 2019, Arris was acquired by network infrastructure provider Comm ...

in 2011. BigBand manufactured and sold digital video and data processing products and services for digital video and

cable modem termination system A cable modem termination system (CMTS) is a piece of equipment, typically located in a cable company's headend or hubsite, which is used to provide high speed data services, such as cable Internet or Voice over Internet Protocol, to cable subsc ...

s (CMTS). During its existence, ''BigBand'' won two Emmy Awards for its

video on demand Video on demand (VOD) is a media distribution system that allows users to access videos without a traditional video playback device and the constraints of a typical static broadcasting schedule. In the 20th century, broadcasting in the form of ...

service and

switched video Switched video or switched digital video (SDV), sometimes referred to as switched broadcast (SWB), is a telecommunications industry term for a network scheme for distributing digital video via a cable. Switched video sends the digital video more ...

technology.

Description

BigBand's development centers were assimilated by

. The main video products are developed in

Tel Aviv Tel Aviv-Yafo ( he, תֵּל־אָבִיב-יָפוֹ, translit=Tēl-ʾĀvīv-Yāfō ; ar, تَلّ أَبِيب – يَافَا, translit=Tall ʾAbīb-Yāfā, links=no), often referred to as just Tel Aviv, is the most populous city in the ...

, Israel employing roughly 200 people. The main data and voice products development center is in

Westborough, Massachusetts Westborough is a town in Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 21,567 at the 2020 Census, in over 7,000 households. Incorporated in 1717, the town is governed under the New England open town meeting system, headed ...

with roughly 175 people. A third research and development office is located in

Shenzhen Shenzhen (; ; ; ), also historically known as Sham Chun, is a major sub-provincial city and one of the special economic zones of China. The city is located on the east bank of the Pearl River estuary on the central coast of southern province ...

, China. The company formerly sold video, voice, and data products directly to major cable multi-system operators (MSOs). Amongst the company's biggest MSO clients were Comcast,

Time Warner Cable Time Warner Cable, Inc. (TWC) was an American cable television company. Before it was acquired by Charter Communications on May 18, 2016, it was ranked the second largest cable company in the United States by revenue behind only Comcast, operat ...

Cablevision Cablevision Systems Corporation was an American cable television company with systems serving areas surrounding New York City. It was the fifth-largest cable provider and ninth-largest television provider in the United States. Throughout its ex ...

Cox Cox may refer to: * Cox (surname), including people with the name Companies * Cox Enterprises, a media and communications company ** Cox Communications, cable provider ** Cox Media Group, a company that owns television and radio stations ** ...

with

Verizon Verizon Communications Inc., commonly known as Verizon, is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate and a corporate component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The company is headquartered at 1095 Avenue of the Americas ...

becoming their biggest customer in 2006. BigBand's main products include a digital video processing platform called BMR and a

(CMTS) called Cuda. The video platform enables services such as

, digital cable,

and

IPTV Internet Protocol television (IPTV) is the delivery of television content over Internet Protocol (IP) networks. This is in contrast to delivery through traditional terrestrial, satellite, and cable television formats. Unlike downloaded med ...

offered on a variety of transport networks such as

QAM Quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) is the name of a family of digital modulation methods and a related family of analog modulation methods widely used in modern telecommunications to transmit information. It conveys two analog message signa ...

cable,

DSL Digital subscriber line (DSL; originally digital subscriber loop) is a family of technologies that are used to transmit digital data over telephone lines. In telecommunications marketing, the term DSL is widely understood to mean asymmetric dig ...

and Verizon Fios. BigBand won two Emmy Awards, one for service in the US with Time Warner Cable "Start Over", enabling

, the ability to pause a broadcast program and watch it later. In 2008, BigBand received the

Technology and Engineering Emmy Award The Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards, or Technology and Engineering Emmys, are one of two sets of Emmy Awards that are presented for outstanding achievement in engineering development in the television industry. The Technology and Engineer ...

for its

technology which enabled cable operators to deliver unlimited number of broadcast channels to their subscribers.

History

2007 IPO and class action lawsuit

BigBand went public in March 2007. The offering was underwritten by

Morgan Stanley Morgan Stanley is an American multinational investment management and financial services company headquartered at 1585 Broadway in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. With offices in more than 41 countries and more than 75,000 employees, the fir ...

, Merrill Lynch, Jeffries & Company, Cowen & Company and ThinkEquity. In October 2007, a class-action shareholder lawsuit was filed on behalf of shareholders who purchased BigBand Network securities in the company's IPO on March 15, 2007. The lawsuit sought to pursue remedies under the Securities Act of 1933. The complaint alleged BigBand violated the Securities Act, and that company insiders including the CEO, CFO and CTO knowingly published misleading and false statements about the company's financial health and product offerings. In particular, the complaint alleged that BigBand materially misstated their revenues, and engaged, among other allegations, in the practice informally known as

channel stuffing Channel stuffing is a business practice in which a company, or a sales force within a company, inflates its sales figures by forcing more products through a distribution channel than the channel is capable of selling. Also known as trade loading, ...

to artificially inflate their financials prior to IPO. The suit was settled in 2009, with BigBand agreeing to pay US$1.5 million. In 2007, BigBand sued a firm started by ex-employees. The firm, called Imagine Communications, was allegedly infringing on 3 of BigBand's patents covering video processing and bandwidth management techniques.

Acquisition by Arris Group

In 2011 the acquisition of BigBand by

was completed for $172 million, with Arris paying $53 million for the acquisition of BigBand's outstanding shares.

Publications

* Network Design for a Multiplicity of Services (2003) * The Triple-Play Network Platform (2004) * The Statistics of Switched Broadcast (2005) * Advanced Monitoring of Switched Broadcast Systems (2007)

References

External links

* * {{Finance links , name = BigBand Networks , symbol = BBND , sec_cik = 1381325 , hoovers = Bigband_Networks_Inc.af8785462aae3ed1 Companies based in Redwood City, California Companies formerly listed on the Nasdaq