Two organizations representing small, rural telcos in the US--the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC) and the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association (NTCA)--have signed a long-term agreement to cooperate on enabling their members to roll out IPTV services. The organizations are working with SES Americom, a company that provides a turnkey IPTV distribution solution called IP-PRIME, and say that they will begin offering a service based on that solution to their members in 2006. Members that have already launched IPTV service, meanwhile, will be able to take advantage of MPEG-4/IPTV-based program packages to enhance their current offerings. The agreement calls for the organizations to coordinate efforts to promote IPTV as an "ideal solution" for rural telcos entering the video business, and calls for the NTCA to make a "significant equity investment" in the NRTC's current IPTV project, which is now in the planning stages: earlier this year, the NRTC signed an agreement with SES Americom to assist it in the field-testing of the IP-PRIME platform. "By providing secured program licensing agreements, volume discounts on equipment, and an 80 to 90 percent savings on associated infrastructure costs, the NRTC/SES/NTCA alliance will allow rural telephone companies to offer the highest-quality service without paying a high price," NRTC president and CEO, Bob Phillips, said in a prepared statement.
IP PRIME, which was launched in September, is touted by SES Americom as a centralized, satellite- and fiber-delivered IPTV distribution service that will provide smaller telcos with a package of multichannel and on-demand standard- and high-definition IPTV programming as part of their triple-play offerings. The service will originate from an SES Americom IPTV Broadcast Center, located in Vernon Valley, New Jersey, where video and audio will be received and processed for distribution via satellite and fiber to telco video hubs around the US. SES Americom says that IP-PRIME programming will be delivered to the hubs in encrypted form, and that it will offer the option of conditional access and middleware solutions that extend to the IP set-top to customers that want to minimize their investment in headends and streamline their video operations. SES Americom's technology partners for the new service include Scientific-Atlanta and Globecomm Systems. Scientific-Atlanta is providing an MPEG-4 encoding system: SES Americom says that, once the initial phases of the distribution network are complete, it will use more than 100 Scientific-Atlanta MPEG-4 standard-definition encoders. It also plans to use Scientific-Atlanta's ROSA Network Management System. Globecomm Systems, meanwhile, will be responsible for the overall design, and will provide integration services, as well as the major components for the service's IPTV broadcast distribution center, which include systems for RF and program acquisition, MPEG-4 compression, and uplinking services.
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