UPC Hungary, along with vendor partners ActiveVideo and Metrological, shared the Cable Europe Innovation Award, presented Thursday at the Cable Congress event in Brussels.

Cable Europe announced the selection on Twitter. 

Cable Europe also announced that Stephen Kelly, communications architect at Liberty Cable, won the the Cable Europe Fellow Award, recognized in part for his role in the launch of the Virgin Media London Underground Wi-Fi solution, deployed in advance of the 2012 Summer Olympics, and, more recently, for defining Liberty Global’s Pan European Wii Architecture. He is has also been a key contributor to CableLabs’s development of industry-wide WiFi specifications and standards, Cable Europe said. 

UPC Hungary, ActiveVideo and Metrological, meanwhile, were recognized for the recent launch of a cloud-based platform that enables the MSO to offer a wide range of apps, including YouTube, on legacy, non-IP set-top boxes. The set-up is supported by StreamCast, a new component for ActiveVideo’s CloudTV system that converts interfaces, video and other content from Web formats to versions that can be rendered on older set-tops, and Metrological’s app platform. Watch this video for more.

According to the awards entry, UPC Hungary launched the offering to 520,000 set-tops in two phases, noting that 68% of subs have tried the service, and 83% have returned for additional views, and that customers are streaming more than 1 million minutes per day of YouTube content.

Other finalists for this year’s Cable Europe Innovation Award included a cloud video engine for the real-time generation of interactive channels by R, R, Syntheractive & Cinfo, and OptimizAIR 2.0, a system from Celeno Communications that Telenet is using to turn home routers into community WiFi hotspots.

Six months into a rollout of an apps platform that integrates YouTube with the set-top box, the percentage of available subs accessing the popular online video service via the STB UPC Hungary’s footprint has risen to 80%,  Arpad Jordan, CTO of UPC Central and Eastern Europe, said at the OTT World Summit in London, according to remarks supplied to Multichannel News.

As we noted in June, UPC Hungary, a unit of Liberty Global, is using ActiveVideo Networks’ CloudTV StreamCast system to deliver YouTube, Flickr, Picasa and other apps to legacy, non-IP boxes.  

According to Jordan, 80% of UPC Hungary customers who access YouTube at the set-top return for repeat views. He also estimated that the hardware cost to UPC Hungary for this functionality is less than 1 Euro per set-top.

UPC Hungary launched the effort in May on about 200,000 HD set-top boxes. In the coming months, the MSO plans to introduce it on another 250,000 standard-def boxes, which will complete the rollout to UPC Hungary’s installed base, he said.

Jordan touted the cloud-based approach, which gives UPC Hungary the ability to deliver advanced services to its full subscriber base without having to first deploy IP-capable devices.

“I think the beauty of this solution is 200,000 set-top boxes all overnight,” he said, according to the remarks supplied to us. “This is not like the usual OTT ramp up where you need to somehow distribute your devices or you need to deal with a very fragile or fragmented operating system or platform in general.” 

UPC Hungary’s decision to use ActiveVideo's cloud-based platform to bring YouTube content to set-tops that don’t speak IP has proven popular in the early going.

The MSO announced Thursday that customers have been watching more than 1 million minutes per day of YouTube content in the first three months after the MSO introduced a set of apps for the set-top box. Of the more than 20 apps on offer (others include Google Maps, Picasa and Flickr), YouTube has been the most popular so far, with 75% of them being repeat visitors and spending 45 minutes per YouTube session on average.

But, as indicated by UPC Hungary data illustrated in the chart above, YouTube usage falls off a cliff during prime time hours.

Following the initial phase of the rollout, the MSO plans to offer UPC TV Apps to all 1.5 million homes in its footprint by the end of 2014. More than half of UPC customers with HD boxes have started to tap into the apps so far.