TelcoTV Preview: Growing wholesale IPTV market speeds service deployment

The momentum in the IPTV marketplace has spurred the growth of an expanding list of wholesale IPTV service providers focused on making the entry into IPTV smoother and faster. These transport aggregators, many of which offer turnkey IPTV for independents, include SES Americom’s IP Prime, Falcon/IP Complete, SezMi, EchoStar and relative newcomer Avail Media, which is rapidly gaining momentum in the rural market.

Founded in early 2007, Avail has grown its customer roster over the past few months to include telephone operators, fiber-to-the-home providers, multiple dwelling unit providers, hospitality providers and even cable companies. At the end of August, it brought its total linear IPTV service provider customers to 20, spanning 14 states in the US. Its roster of 112 customers includes 55 linear clients and 57 on-demand clients totaling nearly 1 million homes past.

As a wholesale service provider, Avail and its competitors acquire programming from content producers and stream it to the central offices of the service provider. It works in conjunction with content aggregators like the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC) or TeleChannel to secure programming rights. Avail has transport rights that let them aggregate, re-encode, process and transport content to a service provider’s location. Groups like the NRTC then have the ability to take that content from the central office to the household and pay back a portion of the revenue to the content owner. Through these partnerships, telcos can avoid lengthy negotiations with hundreds of networks and decrease the necessary investment in major infrastructure.

“Less and less people engage in the build-your-own model,” said Jon Romm, Avail’s chief operating officer. “They are using an aggregator or mutual-fund approach and expanding their capital from the central office to the home.”

This need for a cost-effective means of rapidly deploying a service has caused most to turn toward wholesalers and content aggregators like Avail and the NRTC. While most telcos have committed to TV service as a defensive play at this point, they are still proceeding with caution to get it right the first time, according to Bernie Arnason, managing partner at Pivot Media.