IPTV conferences used to feature announcements of the enormity of tier 1 telco players changing their TV strategy with alarming regularity, but this week in the run up to the IPTV World Forum, one of the largest new deals is a competitive middleware swap out for Dreampark at tiny Alcom in Finland.
When we spoke to Alcom back in 2005 it provided TV to just 10,000 homes
in the Aland Islands across the West Coast of Finland and because it began life without a conditional access system, it had just retrofitted the Latens system in order to gain approval to receive Hollywood movies on its VoD service. The region is ‘culturally Swedish’ but belongs to Finland, so it imports Swedish free to air TV channels, among other things.
Alcom is owned by the local co-operative phone companies and is directly controlled by Alands Datakommunikation, a broadband supplier where every customer is a shareholder. The content is provided largely by Viasat, as it often does, dropping a signal down to each island and the local operation distributing it from there over cable.
The system has a hybrid head end to input other non-Viasat channels which was supplied by French firm Anevia, and also has bitband VoD servers, and Kreatel set tops.
Now it will swap out the defunct middleware from Multivision called Modulution which was a local Anevia partner back then, and install Dreampark Dreamgallery middleware.
Dreampark said that it would have more customers to announce at the show next week and also said that it has also landed a similar deal with Advanced Multimedia Systems, an Egyptian provider of IPTV services, which is expected to take TV service from the Nilesat Satellite, and downlink to regional headends in the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf area. Now it will also push Dreamgallery to clients.