Intelsat has announced a new IP-TV delivery service called Ampiage.
It centralizes the aggregation of national TV programmer content and offers hundreds of video and audio channels in MPEG2 and MPEG4 over the Intelsat Americas fleet. Intelsat says it will enable telcos and MSOs to efficiently bundle an attractive standard and high definition broadcast programming package with their voice and broadband services.
Ampiage acquires, aggregates, encodes, formats and encrypts licensed TV programming and redistributes it via satellite. Telcos and MSOs then distribute this programming content via xDSL, FTTx and other broadband networks as well as conventional cable networks across North America.
Regional and local cable providers now need to invest between millions to build the infrastructure to upgrade from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 encoders. Ampiage says it will bring the multimillion dollar investment down to fraction of the cost, which can be amortized over the entire subscriber base. The reduced upfront investment is coupled by a flexible pricing structure, customized to the customers’ business model.
Since Ampiage is built on an open architecture, operators can further minimize their capital expenditures by either leveraging their existing equipment (including Set Top Boxes) or by choosing equipment from multiple vendors.
Last year Intelsat bought Panamsat for some $3.2 billion. That deal made Intelsat the world’s largest satellite carrier, ahead of SES Global, previously the world’s largest. A combined Intelsat/Panamsat would have 53 satellites with customers in over 220 countries
Competitor SkyStream also provides IP video delivery over satellite. SkyStream’s software and hardware is said to lower costs for service delivery and optimizes video delivery in any network. TANDBERG Television, a leader in MPEG-4 IPTV, bought SkyStream this year. SkyStream’s high density Mediaplex-20 and iPlex switched digital video headends for MPEG-2/MPEG-4 AVC encoding and transcoding are used extensively by IPTV operators in Asia, Europe and the US.
TANDBERG Television announced yesterday that a major U.S. cable operator has purchased their OpenWorks Distributor to enable a unified platform for software management of OCAP-based set-tops, legacy set-top boxes, OpenCable host devices such as TVs, DVRs and OCAP-compliant applications.
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