12 April 2010, Moscow. COMSTAR – United TeleSystems (COMSTAR-UTS, LSE: CMST), the leading operator of integrated telecom services in Russia and the CIS, announces beginning of testing the technology for new additional service Pause Live-TV launch.

Pause Live-TV service, i.e. opportunity for subscriber to suspend viewing of a life program to accomplish some immediate tasks, is available on interactive IPTV only.

At the first stage of Pause Live-TV service launch COMSTAR implemented on its own Moscow BBA network special software by Edgeware and started internal testing of new service. Later on external testing is planned, following the results of which a decision on commercial operation will be made. Then the service will probably become available for more than 128K. subscribers of digital STREAM  IPTV in Moscow.

«IPTV additional services have always been popular among our subscribers. For example, “Video-on-request” has stable subscriber base which equals approximately third part of all the digital Internet-TV service subscribers. Pause Live-TV service may be deemed as one of the most interesting opportunities of interactive TV. In the following we plan to work on enhancement and technological improvement of IPTV services»,  - said Viktor Belov, COMSTAR-UTS director for service platforms and networks development.

Edgeware offers system of servers with flash-memory for implementation of Video-on-request, Pause Live-TV, Time shifted TV and also system of content distribution by service into IPTV networks. As a result operator gets an opportunity to locate servers closer to subscribers and record into their memory (“to cache”).