Skystream lands Kansas IOC deal

SkyStream Networks this week will announce its third Midwest customer win in two weeks.

The vendor, which said it had signed deals with two Iowa independents last week, will announce that Nex-Tech, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rural Telephone Service Company, has deployed SkyStream’s Mediaplex-20 to offer video over DSL and fiber.

Nex-Tech’s service will include more than 170 channels of broadcast video, 45 digital music channels, interactive pay-per-view and video-on-demand services. Nex-Tech is transmitting content over its ADSL network at bit rates ranging from 2.3 to 3.5 Mb/s, depending on the type of channel and its requirements, said Ramin Farassat, director of marketing and broadcast technologies architecture for SkyStream.

"There are certain channels that they don’t need to provide more bandwidth to," he said. "They’re sending those through with 2.3 Mb/s and it could save them some bandwidth down the road."

The deal takes on a little more significance because Nex-Tech is deploying true triple play services with all the bells and whistles, Frassat said.

"There’s a lot of shortcuts that people have made in other deployments," he said. "Some are of them not bothering with music; some of them are doing video on demand. Rural went all the way."

The deal is the third publicly announced customer win for SkyStream over the past couple of weeks. Most recently, the company said Coon Creek Telephone and South Slope Cooperative would use its head end equipment to provide pay-per-view and live video service.