VoD Vendors Target Small Telcos with Turnkey Solutions

Avail Media Inc.’s pending launch of its outsourced video-on-demand ser-vice will cap a summer in which vendors have outfitted smaller carriers with VoD solutions that deliver cheaper and quicker alternatives to do-it-yourself enhanced TV approaches.

“We’re reducing the risk of wading into VoD waters for operators,” said Michael Kazmier, CTO of Avail Media. “We’re offering telcos a flat, per-subscriber, monthly fee option minus the capex, which we believe can push op-erator savings toward 90 percent as compared to having to buy all the hardware and software.”

Several small telcos, especially rural operators, had complained a year ago that they were caught in a Catch-22 situation in which they wanted to deploy VoD to generate new revenue streams, but couldn’t justify buying all the servers, related video encoding systems and storage devices needed to offer it.

Since then, vendors have taken a page from the raft of rent-versus-buy IPTV packages launched at NXTcomm 2007 by the likes of SES Americom Inc., Eagle Broadband and Falcon, and applied the same model to VoD.

In addition to Avail Media, other vendors that recently have unveiled VoD offers for smaller carriers are SeaChange International Inc.and TVN Entertainment.

With the Avail Media offer, carriers will pay a one-time set-up charge of more than $10,000 and an as-yet un-specified per-subscriber monthly fee.

The company’s VoD offering is designed for telcos looking to support roughly 500 to 30,000 subscribers per geographic region, said Kazmier. The package spans content acquisition, preparation (encoding in SD and HD) and distribution via satellite. It’s integrated with widely used IPTV middleware from Minerva Networks Inc. and pay-per-view content security/conditional access systems from Verimatrix Inc.

Avail and TVN already have built content libraries through programming carriage deals with movie houses, sports network owners and more, a process seen as long, arduous and resource-consuming. “Content owners see this model as yet another way to monetize content through its use by more operators,” notes Kazmier.

Avail’s ViewTrak portal enables carriers to view content consumption and create and launch marketing cam-paigns around those patterns, and to alter the campaigns as needed. Canned and custom reports on system usage also are included.

While it doesn’t offer VoD-as-a-service, SeaChange announced in June a VoD package targeted at small carriers. The advanced advertising capabilities of the system provide operators with another means, beyond pay-per-view movies sales, to generate revenue from on-demand content systems.

By packaging all the pieces a carrier needs to deliver VoD, SeaChange said it has simplified for carriers the de-ployment of this capability. The turnkey solution includes servers, software, storage, management and SeaChange’s Axiom back-office system. Through a partnership with TVN Entertainment, all the programming needed to launch and expand a content library also is included.

SeaChange’s entry-level VOD Now and Spot Now systems are aimed at operators with less than 20,000 subscrib-ers and startup advertising operations. The vendor’s MediaCluster servers use off-the-shelf disks and memory to provide VOD Now customers with as few as 50 and as many as 1,400 simultaneous MPEG-2 or MPEG-4 SD and HD streams.

“We’ve ensured that operators of any size can move very quickly to break churn, attract new subscribers and es-tablish revenue streams with VoD and advertising,” said Alan Hoff, senior director of on-demand solutions for SeaChange. “Our entry-level solutions enable customers at this end of the market to make a modest investment to kick off, but leave plenty of room for growth in content, channels and advanced services.”

SeaChange claims its VoD system conserves storage with a single-copy approach, so only one copy of any video asset is required to meet any number of concurrent stream requests. VOD Now is available in configurations with up to 5,000 hours of storage and supports an array of IP set-top boxes, including units from Motorola Inc. and Cisco’s Scientific-Atlanta company.

SeaChange’s Spot Now advertising offering handles fulfillment without operator intervention, using spots loaded through an encoding station and schedules provided from ad traffic and billing systems. It supports up to 48 in-sertable SD channels. Operators can start with 12 channels and grow economically in 12-channel increments.

Hoff says the company will evolve its advertising functionality over time to extend beyond linear capability to targeted and dynamic insertion of commercials. In the meantime, small operators can start selling local ads to supplement pay-per-view on-demand purchases.

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