SkyStream tunes in 20 MPEG-4 wins

SkyStream announced today that it has 20 MPEG-4 AVC customers worldwide for its Mediaplex and iPlex video headend systems. Additionally, the company announced that it had a profitable second quarter, two quarters ahead of schedule, in large part due to orders from telcos deploying IPTV service.

Though privately held, Jim Olson, president and CEO of SkyStream, said the company went public with some financial information to provide assurances to customers that it was on stable ground.

“Almost everybody [in this market] is losing money, and some are losing significant money,” he said. “Our overall IPTV strategy drove us into profitably in the quarter. We had a plan to be profitable by the end of the year, and we beat that by two quarters.”

Though the company didn’t announce any specific customers as part of today’s news, Olsen credited the U.S. telco market, noting that in the past 18 months the company has gone from zero to 35 accounts sold.

Attracting a lot of attention among telcos is SkyStream’s MPEG-4 AVC transcoder, which allows carriers to convert MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 in one step.

“Almost 100% of our orders now for U.S. telcos are for MPEG-4,” he said. “The problem is that just about every piece of content on earth is in MPEG-2.”