SES AMERICOM Launches Turnkey IPTV Package for Carriers

First discussed with strong interest at the Telco TV 2005 conference, SES AMERICOM’s turnkey IP-Prime IPTV package for service providers is finally set to take flight, with commercial availability of the satellite-based offering slated for Tuesday.

Perhaps partially victimized by its own allure, availability of the services was delayed twice since, once because of delays in volume shipments and the necessary set-top boxes and again by an extended series of beta-tests.

A likely third culprit, which has impacted rollouts for many providers, is the commercial availability of MPEG-4 video encoders which provide better video quality than their MPEG-2 predecessors and are more bandwidth-efficient. As a result, MPEG-4 is a key selling point for potential customers.

Delays aside, the package is designed to reduce the costs and speed deployment of IPTV for those interested by employing a shared headend, instead of having to buy the big-ticket capex and integrated devices and more 250 channels of content.

The nature of the complicated, multifaceted ecosystem needed to deploy IPTV has garnered much interest for IP-PRIME, which SES describes as a turnkey package that offers interested carriers choices in the many inter-related hardware and software categories.

“Telcos of all sizes will find IP-PRIME minimizes the risk of a complex technical integration, simplifies difficult program acquisition challenges and lowers their financial risks for launching a television service,” said Michelle Abraham, principal analyst at In-Stat.

IP-PRIME delivers a full array of programming channel options, a carrier-grade headend, a choice of consumer set top boxes and multiple middleware packages.

“We invested tens of millions of dollars and over two years developing IP-PRIME , and put the solution through extensive testing so we can be sure we’re offering our customers the most complete, easiest-to-deploy and most cost-effective way for them to offer their subscribers television service,” said Bill Squadron, senior vice-president of media partnerships at SES, in prepared comments. “The result of our efforts is that SES AMERICOM is the first company to bring an end-to-end, satellite-based television service to market based completely on the new MPEG-4 video standard.”

SES, which operates a fleet of 36 satellites, said IP-PRIME package partners include, Amino, Cisco Systems Inc., Scientific Atlanta, Pannaway, Alcatel-Lucent, Harmonics, Calix, NDS, Occam, Myrio, Tandberg TV, Irdeto and DASCOM. ETI Software, Globecom Systems, IneoQuest, International Data Casting, Patriot Antenna Systems and Tribune Media Services fill out the lineup.

IP-PRIME comes with existing transport agreements with more than 275 television channels and over 100 digital music channels. This program lineup includes more than 20 HDTV channels, pay per view programming and the ability to offer VoD. Customers can pick and choose which channels to include in their lineup, and can easily integrate local programming.

SES AMERICOM Inc. www.ses-americom.com

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