SezMi completes technical trial of digital video

SezMi, the wholesale video provider looking to partner with telephone companies to deliver IPTV without access network upgrades, announced today the completion of its technical trial, conducted with Fisher Communications and Tribune over their digital broadcast spectrum in the Seattle area. The successful technical trial paves the way for consumer trials to begin in the first quarter of 2009 with signed but as-yet undisclosed service provider customers, said David Allred, senior vice president of marketing and product management at SezMi.

The SezMi approach to delivering video uses digital broadcast spectrum from a broad base of digital broadcast partners to deliver live and other real-time programming into the home, where a set-top box equipped with massive local storage and an easy-to-use interface delivers content personalized to individuals in the home. The Seattle technical trial confirmed the end-to-end system, which includes a broadband connection – DSL or cable modem – into the STB in the home for pre-recorded video content.

“One of the reasons we chose Seattle for the technical trial is that there is a broadcasting and reception component to our service that is important, and Seattle is pretty challenging on those fronts because it is hilly and has dense foliage,” Allred said. “We deliberately chose a market that would be pretty demanding, and we have done very well.”

SezMi partners with Harris Corp., which runs its network operation center in Melbourne, Fla., where the content is brought in and encrypted and sent over a satellite link to the local market. “In this case, that was Seattle, and we brought it into Fisher’s broadcast center and inserted that data into the broadcast stream, right alongside their video packets, to be distributed out over the airwaves,” Allred said. “We wanted to make sure the process was seamlessly operable with the broadcast processes and scalable with all the content we were distributing and that we could effectively route content over the air or over broadband connections. All three components were completed successfully. The next step for us is to take it into full-scale consumer trials and bring the service and light up a fairly large number of homes, and they then use it as their only TV service.”