Accenture works with companies such as Telewest and ntl to help them deliver digital television and other services such as phone and Internet via cable. We deployed large, mainly technical, teams to help them with these service offerings, many of which represented major service innovations.Digital Television – higher picture quality television to people's homes with many more channels.Near Video On Demand (NVOD) – using extra channels to cycle films so, for example, the same film starts every 15 minutes.Video On Demand – customers can rewind, forwardwind and pause the film, as though having control of a DVD player owned by the cable company.Interactive Services – interactivity with content providers, including train timetables, food ordering, two-way TV games, Digital Teletext and Yellow Pages.Internet Access – very fast Internet access by cable, through the television or computer.Accenture provided the technical expertise and project management experience to ensure the successful launch of these services. Typically activities included travelling from site to site to configure, install and test equipment, designing new network and computing architectures, and managing suppliers.The companies that sell the enabling technologies (Cisco, Liberate, Microsoft, etc.) were often selling their products for the first time when we used them for an installation. Getting around the technical problems caused by the newness (and resulting ‘bugs’) was a major challenge. The Accenture team worked very closely with these companies at a technical level to ensure that all the equipment would function correctly.The client businesses have been entirely transformed – for example, over a three-month period Telewest’s offering to its consumers was effectively re-invented with the launch of their Interactive Services.