A bland statement from Verimatrix about its conditional access system being used with the IP Prime IPTV wholesale service in the US, looked very much like a press release that should have had an airing well over a year ago, dusted off for the Telco TV show in Anaheim, California this week.
NDS has boasted long and hard that it is the basis for the conditional access on the IP Prime service and none of the other conditional access companies have said much about it, except that Latens has claimed the laurels at the rival IPTV wholesale group set up by EchoStar called ViP-TV.
This wholesale model has been interesting from the first, but as Verimatrix has told us, ‘it’s taken an awfully long time to iron out the kinks in the business model,’ and by our count that long time is something like 3 years.
But it turns that out that Verimatrix has been simulcrypting with NDS for over a year now and the first 20 customers for IP Prime are now onstream. What happens is that there is aggregated content and a single IP head end for the whole USA, which re-compresses TV channels, and this is then IP encapsulated and sent up to a SES Americom satellite, and then dropped ready made down to a tiny multicast distribution node among the 1,000 or so tiny US local telcos that speak for around 10 million homes in the US. The satellite wholesale model is about the only way of reaching a market that is this broken up.
Local telcos networks often need upgrades in order to cope with IPTV, but once this is done the raw IP feed can then be presented at the set top and with localized VoD services, using any middleware. Nokia Siemens Networks, using what was once the Myrio IPTV middleware is partnered with Verimatrix and our local US contacts tell us that this pairing has done the lion’s share of business on IP Prime. The other options are end to end NDS middleware and encryption. But still no local Telcos have actually come out and said publicly they are using the service.
This wholesale model is building a head of steam in the US, with Avail Media in the US joining the existing offerings late last year after it placed its IPTV offering on an Intelsat satellite, offering 200 TV channels. At Telco TV Avail announced that it now has 40 affiliates signed up for live broadcast MPEG-4 IPTV content. It also offers a variety of technology partners but once again Verimatrix claims that it is live on services which pass 500,000 homes and this represents 76% of Avail Media’s customer base.
Falcon is another name in the business, but really this is just a reseller of the IP Prime services and Echostar partnered with Irish conditional access firm Latens last year to go head to head with them all, but has yet to announced any clear wins. EchoStar is understood to be using the wholesale offering primarily to reach multi-dwelling units and hospitality system such as hotels, where individual satellite dishes are not an option.
Given that wholesale finally appears to be taking off, there is no reason why DirecTV won’t shortly enter the business as well.