SES Backs Out of Managed, Turnkey IPTV Market

Refocuses on Content Delivery, Partnerships

Three years after SES Americom Inc. announced its managed, turnkey IPTV package before a wide-eyed throng of mid-tier, small and rural telcos at TelcoTV 2005, the company is comprising its IP-PRIME service of only content delivery via satellite, with all else passed off to vendor partners.

Perhaps because the goal was overly ambitious, SES pulled out of the managed turnkey IPTV package business and now is relying on key partners to provide equipment and software integration and management.

The fundamental change in the DNA of the IPTV service, which portended to create an entirely new industry for telcos in need of IPTV, reflects the complex nature of providing and managing a long, multivendor IPTV and content delivery ecosystem.

“There was a shift in strategy,” admitted Jim Ducay, COO for SES Americom. “Operators today can take our signal and content and work with others to take things the rest of the way. There’s still a need for a managed service, but we don’t need to do it all.”

SES already has partnered with Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) and Nortel Networks Corp. (NT), who are far better equipped not only to provide many of the products needed to build IPTV services, but to provide the critical integration services and management necessary to make it all work.

For its part, satellite operator SES provides the extensive content lineup featuring 267 standard-definition (SD) channels and more than 50 high-definition (HD) channels — the heart of the IPTV service. This offloads the heavy-lifting of content negotiation and acquisition for small telcos that can deliver only limited resources.

In the few years following the pre-announcement of the package at TelcoTV 2005, SES cut partnership deals with vendors to supply all the pieces that comprise an IPTV ecosystem in an effort to cover all the bases for rural telcos. The deals, which included set-top boxes, middleware and outside plant network infrastructure, took SES well beyond its core competency of providing satellite content delivery services.

“We got into 2006 and realized that just providing transport capability was not enough,” said Ducay. “We integrated the equipment and built an operations center and launched our first commercial customer in July 2007.”

Share this article: Email, Slashdot, Digg, Del.icio.us, Yahoo!MyWeb, Windows Live Favorites, Furl
Add this article feed to: RSS, My Yahoo, Newsgator, Bloglines