TelcoTV: IP-Prime picks up momentum

ANAHEIM – SES Americom’s IP-Prime announced today that it has signed up more than 65 telcos in 31 states, trumping its three customer additions announced at last year’s show. Of those signed up, approximately 30 are commercially delivering IP-Prime, with another dozen expected to be up and running by year’s end.

“Where we are today, we are clearly the leaders in the telco space,” said Jim Ducay, chief operating officer of SES Americom. “2008 was a very good year for market adoption. In 2009, we only see it going upwards as we start to look at other markets.”

IP-Prime’s customers, today primarily telcos, use the service either as a complete IPTV programming package of more than 200 standard definition and 50 high-definition channels transported to the headend or as an exclusive HD overlay to their existing IPTV operations. Almost one third of those customers have adopted the HD-4 solution, designed to add dozens of HD channels in MPEG-4 on to an existing IPTV platform, Ducay said, adding that IP-Prime can save an operator as much as 90% compared to building its own MPEG-4 IPTV offering.

“Cost is still the biggest hurdle for IPTV,” he said, adding that without the help of a content aggregator, it would cost upwards of $5 million to $10 million. Quality of service is most telcos’ primary reason for selecting IP-Prime, he said, followed closely by the ability to offer local content and an easily navigable interface. HD is also significantly more important to IP-Prime’s customers than video-on-demand content.

“High definition is clearly the big driver here,” he said. “The early pioneers in MPEG-2 saw HD as a problem. They didn’t have the network bandwidth to do it. But we can offer, for $20,000, bolt-on HD content in MPEG-4. This has been extremely successful for us. We’ve penetrated almost one third of early adopters in the last year.”