After some final trials and tweaking, SES AMERICOM said today that its end-to-end IPTV solution, IP-PRIME, is commercially available. IP-PRIME has received extensive and successful technical trials with large, medium and small sized telcos across the United States, and is now available to any North American telco looking for a turnkey solution to offer their customers a world-class television service.

SES AMERICOM's IP-PRIME gives telecommunications companies the ability to offer television together with their other services. It goes without saying that adding television service can be complex and expensive, but IP-PRIME minimizes the risk of a complex technical integration, simplifies difficult program acquisition challenges and lowers their financial risks for launching a television service.

The solution developed by SES AMERICOM gives telcos and private network operators everything they need to deliver a fully-featured television service over existing network infrastructures:

• An array of programming channel options
• A carrier-grade headend
• A choice of consumer set-top boxes
• Multiple middleware solutions that make it all work

Customers benefit from SES AMERICOM's expertise in television distribution, helping ensure that customers select a proven technical solution, thus reducing both the technical risk and financial cost of deploying a new video service. The IP-PRIME solution not only delivers high-quality video, it also saves customers millions of dollars of capital and operational expenditures when compared to the costs of building their own service.

"SES AMERICOM has utilized our decades of experience to build an IPTV solution that is the closest thing to flicking a switch to turn on service," said Bill Squadron, senior vice president of media partnerships at SES AMERICOM. "We invested tens of millions of dollars and over two years developing IP-PRIME, and put the solution through extensive testing so we can be sure we're offering our customers the most complete, easiest-to-deploy and most cost-effective path for them to offer their subscribers television service. The result of our efforts is that SES AMERICOM is the first company to bring an end-to-end, satellite-based television service to market built completely on the new MPEG-4 video standard."

The entire solution is based on the MPEG-4 digital video standard that offers improved video quality together with greater bandwidth efficiency over the MPEG-2 standard. The MPEG-4 standard makes IP-PRIME particularly ideal for enabling networks to accommodate numerous applications and features, as well as accommodate the explosive growth in HDTV channels.

The IP-PRIME ecosystem employs open, standards-based technologies from multiple world-class technology partners. SES AMERICOM tests and qualifies each third-party technology or middleware component before integrating it into IP-PRIME. By using open standards and ensuring interoperability, SES AMERICOM is providing customers with options, and ensuring that their service is leading edge today and well into the future.

IP-PRIME comes with existing transport agreements for over 275 television channels and over 100 digital music channels, giving customers the easiest way to offer a broad range of diverse programming. This program line up includes over 20 HDTV channels, as well as pay per view programming and the ability to offer video-on-demand service. Customers can pick and choose which channels to include in their line-up, and can easily integrate local programming.

"Because of SES AMERICOM's years of leadership and technical innovation in broadcast television, we selected IP-PRIME as the exclusive end-to-end IPTV service for our rural telco members," said Steve Bing, senior vice president of the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC). "Our members tell us that IPTV service will be a critical component of their service portfolio, and SES AMERICOM is giving them the easiest path to a very comprehensive service. With IP-PRIME, NRTC members will have the fastest path to bring to market a complete and technically advanced television service."

IP-PRIME is commercially available as of today. For more information visit www.ip-prime.tv.