SES IPTV Package for Rural Telcos Delayed Again

When the topic of deploying IPTV comes up at the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association’s (NTCA) annual conference, which kicks off Monday, SES-Americom Inc. could find itself fielding a lot of questions from rural telcos on why its IP-Prime service has again been delayed, this time until summer.

The heavily promoted SES service, which uses a shared head-end to bypass big-ticket telco capital expenditure costs and provides all the pieces of the IPTV ecosystem for those that don’t want to buy and build it themselves, was first announced at the TelcoTV conference in November 2005.

One year at the NTCA’s 2006 annual gathering, the satellite services provider confirmed for attendees that the service was going into beta tests and would be available by the end of the summer. But at TelcoTV 2006 in November, SES confirmed commercial availability would be delayed until early this year due to problems with set-top boxes (STB) that it would not elaborate on.

Now, three months later, SES is setting commercial availability for sometime this summer. When asked the nature of the delay, a company executive deferred to the reason given at the most recent TelcoTV show and declined to provide additional details.

“What’s new is that we’re rapidly approaching commercial launch this summer,” said Jon Russo, senior vice-president of marketing and product management for SES. He added that the beta trials of the service have not yet concluded, and the company is not yet finished on the programming side of the service.

The delays don’t bode well for SES as several competitors, Eagle Broadband Inc. and Falcon Communications Inc. and Auroras Entertainment LLC, are pushing services designed to help rural telcos achieve the same goals – deploying IPTV services without the time and expense of buying all the parts, followed by integrating and managing them.

While the SES service package has drawn strong interest from some rural providers, many have already deployed video services, with these operators recognized as some of the earliest and most aggressive in taking the core offering to customers.

Largely because of its strong ties with the NTCA and the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative – interest in the service grew, with several members agreeing to beta test the offering. Since that confab, little has been heard of from SES on the anticipated offering.

SES will announce Monday that it’s teaming with Cisco Systems Inc. as part of the service evolution, though the vendor’s products, and those of companies the networking giant has acquired, have been on the IP Prime menu for some time.

In an effort to help telcos deploy the service when it becomes available, Cisco is adding what it calls a “video readiness assessment professional services engagement” designed to “evaluate the capacity of networks to handle sustained traffic associated with video traffic.”

Cisco Systems Inc. www.cisco.com  

National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative www.nrtc.org  

National Telecommunications Cooperative Association www.ntca.org  

SES Americom Inc. www.ses-americom.com

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