TelcoTV: Nagravision another option for independent IPTV

ANAHEIM, Calif. – After cutting its teeth on conditional access for cable and satellite operators, Nagravision is offering similar services for IPTV and teaming with fellow Kudelski Group subsidiaries such as Quative to offer an integrated IPTV solution. Here at TelcoTV, Nagravision announced Iowa Network Services, the pay-TV service owned by 122 Iowa independent telcos, as a new MPEG-4 IPTV customer.

“We’ve done content protection on a larger scale, particularly in Europe, and we did the cable system for INS,” explained Nagravision’s Robin Wilson. “They liked us for that, so now we’re doing the same thing for their IPTV service, plus Quative is providing a service delivery platform.”

In Europe, Nagravision typically offered hybrid systems – satellite/terrestrial conditional access and content protection for cable and DSL for IPTV, Wilson said, but only the DISH Homezone service had similar requirements in the US, so the company has focused on cable and now on DSL-based IPTV.  

The company hasn’t traditionally been involved at the IPTV middleware level, working with other providers such as Minerva and Myrio, now part of Nokia Siemens Networks, Wilson said, but recent problems faced by its independent telco customers dealing with their IPTV middleware has prompted a second look at that market. For INS, Nagravision is providing an integrated solution that uses a flexible centralized middleware server architecture that offers an open applications programming interface to support multiple high-definition set-top boxes.

“The Quative solution really is a services delivery platform – it exists entirely in the headend,” Wilson said. “We can also provide the middleware on the set-top box or we can use someone else’s. It’s a clean and published API [application programming interface].”