The new Intelsat, the combined business with Intelsat and PanAmSat, has merged the two companies’ MPEG 4 based IPTV businesses into one for the US market, and licensed the output to the freshly created Avail Media to sell into US telcos, fiber operators and cable networks.
Avail has come out of nowhere but is a merger created in December from 3 year old Broadstream and Auroras Entertainment. Broadstream provides managed IPTV services taking care of the head end side of things while
Auroras is strong in telco and FTTH deployments.
The CEO of the new merged company is Ramu Potarazu, who was formerly COO of Intelsat, and Avail will now front the Intelsat push to be the head end for either cable or telco TV operations offering 200 MPEG 4 (H.264) encoded channels that will rain IPTV down from the sky, eliminating the need for smaller US incumbents to have a head end of their own, something that knocks well over $1 million of the price of an IPTV installation.
This is not a new idea and SES and Eagle Broadband and France’s Globecast, have been offering similar services for some time with SES landing a huge trial that before the merger with AT&T might have meant it acting as the distributor for all of the Bellsouth IPTV efforts. This is also how many of Minerva’s successful IPTV deployments in the US receive content.
The idea is that a satellite operator builds one single big video head end for the entire of the US, downloads TV channels in MPEG2 from satellite, cleans them and re-compresses them using MPEG 4 H.264 and then puts them back into IP packets, and distributes them as IP ready streams via satellite.
SES has its super head end in New Jersey, while both Intelsat and PanAmSat had launched similar services when separate organizations, with the PanAmSat Skyway Connect service previously only supporting Nagravision conditional access. Intelsat’s and PanAmSat’s IPTV super head end services are now merged.
Avail Media will look to turn the system into full IPTV systems adding know how in set tops, and a selection of DRM systems as well as handling content rights, subscriber management, middleware and local integration. The service is equally applicable to cable operators where they are happy to offer their systems carried in IP packets.
Intelsat and PanAmSat merged in a deal announced in August 2005, putting together the two most successful of the global satellite fleets, under the guidance of private equity groups and public investment banks.
Intelsat had traditionally relied on core telephony services, while PanAmSat offers the widest distribution of video services transmitting almost 2,000 broadcast TV channels globally. The two have a combined fleet of 53 satellites and serve customers in 220 countries and territories.
Intelsat also bought the best assets of Loral Corp, including 6 satellites, back in 2004.