While satellite companies like SES Americom and Globecast are perceived purely as satellite operators that deliver IPTV services to other telcos, the sudden emergence of EchoStar as a provider to the IPTV community changes all the stakes in satellite IP delivery.
This week an EchoStar subsidiary EchoStar FSS introduced ViP-TV in the US, as a ready made satellite feed to slide straight into existing IPTV services. That means an existing US incumbent needs no head end, no separate DRM system, no set top design issues, and can simply focus on its own network condition, and customer acquisition for triple play.
EFSS will provide 300 channels and 40 HD channels of secure broadcast TV via satellite to telcos, private and rural cable operators, municipalities and community video providers.
In essence this is a turnkey system for content distribution, and content aggregation for an MPEG-4 IP encapsulated TV. ViP-TV says that it can offer content from 165 local market and will address a market of 1,000 cable and Telco systems. It looks to us it will compete head on with IP Prime, the service from SES Americom.
EFSS’s ViP-TV will be delivered via Ku Band satellite with a full US footprint, EFSS also says that it will offer a design, engineering and IP head-end service and its own design of set top box.
We can immediately see how this can play against the announcement that EchoStar made a month ago, that it would re-organize itself into two companies, one which would be a technology and infrastructure business, and one which would contain the DISH network DTH service.
The technology company kicked off the announcement with a deal to acquire Sling Media, the market leader in placeshifting, for $380 million and has already landed the satellite rights to deliver China’s first mobile TV signals, in time for next year’s Olympics, which will be leased to the Chinese authorities.
EchoStar also has great L band 1.4 GHz spectrum in the US from the February 2007 auctions, probably to start other mobile based business in the US, it is also planning to offer wholesale satellite capacity across the US with new satellites, both owned and leased, and it has just bought its way into the Korean S-DMB satellite company TU Media, as well as offering satellite services to a new DTH in the Philippines. Add this service to distribute pay TV services to partners across the US, and its non-DISH businesses begin to look quite compelling.
EchoStar already has some of its own patents in Digital Video Recorders, and if it could resolve its case with TiVo (or even buy TiVo ‘ why not?) it might put place shifting and time shifting together as a single royalty base for global exploitation.
We speculated at that time, and it still looks a good bet, that this is in preparation for DISH being sold, perhaps to AT&T, perhaps to Liberty Media to merge with DirecTV, and is the creation of another services operation for CEO Charlie Ergen. See lead story this week for more on that score.
Far from there being a global glut in satellite capacity, there is now a shortage on the near horizon, as broadcasting goes through a series of revolutions and has added mobile TV and HD broadcast services.