Cisco has for a long time been making tiny mouse noises in the IPTV market, never quite having the bravery to leap lock stock and barrel into the technology and so effectively missing out on a lot of businesses because of that.
We have yet to see a deployment of its router based Visual Quality Experience, which was launched in December 2006, which promised so much by offering packet localized resend to ensure IPTV service quality along with fast channel change, all down at the super fast network layer of an IPTV network.
Sure Cisco provides layer three routers, multicast routers and MPLS backbone networks for a variety of IPTV installations, but it has never been the prime contractor for a major piece of a Tier one service.
In fact to date its main move into IPTV has been to buy Scientific Atlanta, itself primarily a set top and encoder business for cable TV, which had just crossed the divide and begun offering IPTV devices.
But at the NAB show this week Cisco had an announcement which shoved it slightly more in the direction of IPTV implementation, tying up with satellite IPTV delivery firm Avail Media, to offer end to end services, purely in the US, and purely for the smaller incumbent telco.
Avail Media came out of the Intelsat and PanAmSat merger that was begun in 2004 and completed in 2006 when they each had MPEG 4 IPTV businesses and merged them into one. Intelsat has a strong position in aggregation because it is probably the biggest distributor of TV signals using satellites in the world.
Avail was a merger of 3 year old Broadstream and Auroras Entertainment. Broadstream provides managed IPTV services taking care of the head end side of things while Auroras was strong in telco and FTTH deployments. It looks to us like Cisco is perhaps taking on much of the role that Auroras used to manage.
The aim was to offer super head end services across the US to both cable and telco TV operations offering 200 MPEG 4 (H.264) encoded channels bringing IPTV down from the sky, eliminating the need for smaller US incumbents to have a head end of their own. Now Cisco is saying that it can offer network services from its own National Control Center, eliminating the need for service providers to hire staff for headend management.
This is not a new idea but few have been able to make money at this business. In December SES Americom with its IP Prime service surprisingly pulled out of the wholesale IPTV market in the US but that still leaves EchoStar recently joining plus existing incumbents such as Falcon IP Complete.
The SES pullout, which will close in July, has led to a scramble to take over SES accounts and Avail earlier this year said it had grabbed a hatful of them. SES had signed up 65 telcos in 31 states for IP Prime and now they all need new homes.
There are something like 1,000 or so tiny US local telcos which speak for around 10 million homes in the US. The satellite wholesale model is about the only way of reaching a market which is this broken up, but as we can see, progress has been too slow for SES.
Avail and Cisco say they can offer encoding, encapsulation, middleware and digital rights management, scrambling and descrambling, satellite receivers, conditional access, set-tops, service management, systems integration services, and program management for video hub office components.
The idea is to take the complexity and time to market out of the equation for US incumbent telcos. Avail Media claims that its VoD services already reach over 1 million US destinations.