SES Americom‘s new Internet-protocol (IP) TV service promises "a front-row seat to the next phase of video technology" for more than 30 programmers and networks that have signed deals to distribute content via the system, a company executive said.

SES Americom unveiled IP Prime, an IPTV distribution solution for the U.S. market, in September 2005. The service is nearly ready to launch with more than 120 channels nationwide, including Lifetime Networks, Hallmark Channels and A&E Television, and SES Americom expects the lineup to grow to more than 200 channels by the launch of the service.

Bryan McGuirk, SES Americom’s president of media solutions, "couldn’t be more bullish" about the prospects for the Princeton, N.J.-based satellite-services provider’s latest efforts, which are designed to deliver satellite-centric video enabling telcos to bundle and distribute hundreds of standard-definition and high-definition (HD) channels with voice and broadband services.

SES Americom is receiving encouraging feedback from IPTV technical trials being performed with Bellsouth which, with input from Microsoft, initiated earlier this year a technical trial of the IPTV technology and later expanded it to market-trial participants.

Using MPEG-4 encoded programming channels, SES Americom provides video aggregation, encoding, monitoring, and transport over the IP Prime platform delivered from SES Americom’s IPTV broadcast center in Vernon Valley, N.J., via the AMC-9 satellite.

"We’re right on schedule with technical development [and] ahead of schedule on some of the features we’re rolling out," McGuirk said.

The National Rural Telecommuni-cations Cooperative (NRTC), a telecommunications and IT association representing some 1,300 rural utilities and affiliates in 47 states, also is performing trials. The trial results have given SES Americom confidence that the IP-Prime IPTV television broadcast center is poised to make its commercial debut before the end of 2006.

"What we’ve found is that we’ve been able to plug-and-play from day one," McGuirk said, with comprehensive testing having included each aspect in play, from the system to plants and the end product’s image quality. With formal announcement yet pending, the time frame still calls for the distribution to begin before year’s end.

"No one’s doing an end-to-end all the way to a set-top box," McGuirk claims. "That includes NDS middleware as well as the Siemens Myrio," part of SES Americom’s turnkey offering enabling broadband carriers to avoid integration difficulties and deliver cost-effectively to set-top boxes.

"Our customers are ahead of pace, but we’re prepared for it," McGuirk says. "The market’s really set to take off." The NRTC itself represents more than 10 million homes, the company said.

As optimistic as he may be about the pending transmissions, McGuirk is even more chipper about the prospect of extending IP to mobile TV. The beauty of the IP-Prime platform is its scalability regardless of user, market and screen size, he said.

"The key areas of growth are in IP and mobile [TV]," McGuirk said. "In hockey terms, we’re skating to where the puck is going. … We’re integrating to get to the markets quicker," which in turn helps the satellite industry drive bandwidth since "there are a million small telcos out there looking forward to this."

McGuirk says that SES Americom, having long since identified that the world was heading toward IP, embraced its potential as they switched from analog to digital.

"We told the [SES Global] board it would be a multi-phased approach," and "we’ve gotten great support," one form of which being SES Global’s 40 satellites.

"The market is sophisticated, keeping on pace for video on demand, et cetera," said McGuirk. "Our vision is to deliver IP content to multiple markets regardless of screen size and to each format and user market," he said, noting "it doesn’t end in the telco markets."

In another trial, slated for early 2007 in Las Vegas, SES Americom will be teaming with Hiwire, a subsidiary of Aloha Partners, to deliver a digital video broadcast-handheld mobile TV to consumers. Its aim is to deliver twice the channels and higher-quality pictures than other mobile TVs by coordinating Hiwire’s 12-megahertz capacity of UHF spectrum and wireless knowledge with SES Americom’s satellites and distribution platforms — not to mention those newly partnered programmers.