Firms Launch IPTV Packages in Rural Revenue Race

If all goes according to plan, rural and low-tier telcos will be presented next month with a trio of IPTV packages designed to reduce the cost and time needed for them to enter the fast-moving and high-stakes consumer video services market.

The offerings – from Eagle Broadband Inc., Falcon Communications Inc. and SES Americom – offer telcos alternatives to buying, integrating and managing the many components of an IPTV ecosystem, including content and often its delivery to customers.

These contestants, in what some call the "race for the rurals," all have suffered delays of some shape or form in 2006, be they with partners, products or programming. The trio, however, all maintain their packages will be off the launch pad next month. One rural telco sees huge value of the (in some cases, long-promised and promoted) packages.

“If we could have done things over again, and if the product had been available within a few months of when we wanted to launch, we would definitely have taken a long, hard look at it,” claimed Keith Galitz, president of Canby Telcom, which began deploying TV to consumers in parts of Canby, Ore., more than a year ago. The allure, he added, is the ability to share a headend rather than having to buy one – as this system is among the largest expenses in an IPTV ecosystem.

Eagle Broadband was perhaps the first with its approach, which is not turnkey, and was delayed the longest. The company started talking about this opportunity nearly two years ago.

“We decided initially to partner with GlobeCast WorldTV last year, but we both decided to go our separate ways,” recalled Cindy Plagens, sales manager for Eagle. “They wanted to focus their efforts and resources on Tier 1 service providers, and we wanted to focus on opportunities with smaller players. This situation set us back a bit.”

SES Americom’s IP-PRIME package didn’t suffer from strategy changes with partners, but found alleged challenges with set-top boxes ended up delaying its service launch by about six months.

This setback was higher profile as the SES package had been highly and repeatedly promoted by two large rural telco associations – the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative and the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association – to its membership.

Bryan McGuirk, president of media and enterprise services for SES Americom, cited unspecified problems with set-top boxes as the cause for the delay of IP-PRIME. “In all our hopes and dreams, it would’ve been out earlier this year,” he said in early November.

While McGuirk didn’t note any specific technical issues with the set-top boxes as a reason for the setback – from the summer of 2006 to early 2007 – he did say the lack of volume shipments of the Amino Communications devices was the main culprit. Amino responded by blaming middleware chip vendors.

Rather than delaying its product launch, Falcon, on the other hand, announced its offering nearly two months before it planned to make the package commercially available. Nonetheless, an earlier general availability could’ve resulted in a time-to-market advantage.

IP-PRIME, which was due out this past summer, now is expected to be available commercially early in 2007. An SES executive told xchange at the recent TelcoTV conference that the package will launch with high-definition programming and roughly 400 channels of programming. Programming for SES’s IP-PRIME is delivered by a satellite fleet owned by its parent company.

Falcon said its offering will have HD at an unspecified time next year and only has 145 channels.

The IP/Complete system, according to Falcon, begins with a custom design and flat (but unspecified) subscriber-based pricing. Component-wise, it includes video from the satellite, router, DSLAM on past the middleware. The Falcon system also includes installation, signal management and testing, with final delivery to the set-top box. The vendor claims the signal is fully secure and encrypted throughout the delivery system. The Falcon package uses a video signal from an Intelsat satellite, middleware from Minerva Networks Inc., encryption from Latens Corp., broadband access gear from Occam Networks Inc. and a headend from NetProcessor.

Falcon said the IPTV package is two years in the making, with work culminating with final beta site testing. Turn-on is expected around the turn of the year at BPS Telephone in Bernie, Mo. By comparison, IP-PRIME has been in betas with four rurals for months.

Eagle takes a somewhat divergent approach than the other two companies with its IPTVComplete offering, figuring that most rurals and small telcos already have some type of network infrastructure for programming delivery and are, therefore, more interested in content and other nontransport network components. “Our target market is not greenfields,” said Plagens. “We eliminate a lot of time and upfront engineering with the shared headend piece. We provide the content and let the telco focus on the distribution infrastructure.”

Eagle goes further than headend and content. It built its own set-top boxes and uses middleware from Minerva. Like Falcon, it counts Latens as its conditional access, aka content security, provider. It will offer 200 channels of programming.

Eagle already launched a shared headend to support its offering in Miami, notes Plagens.

Eagle Broadband Inc. www.eaglebroadband.com
Falcon Communications Inc. www.falconcommunications.com
SES Americom www.ses-americom.com

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines