Kasenna is working with Business Computer Center (BCC), a System Integrator based in St. Petersburg, Russia, to implement an IPTV solution for Russia's Southern Telecom Company (UTK), the principal fixed-line telecommunications provider for Russia's Southern Federal District.

This is the first major deployment of its kind in Russia utilizing part of Kasenna's PortalTV solution -- Mediabase Video on Demand (VOD) server platform, 40 Network PVR (NVPR) channels with pause live TV, and vFusion, its content delivery and management tool. The combined solution will provide an integrated network and IPTV infrastructure for UTK.

UTK's IPTV solution, branded "DiSel TV", has initially been deployed in two cities around Krasnodar in southern Russia and the service already covers about 27 percent of the proposed network,, with 33 TV channels and several thousand subscribers. The IPTV service is now being extended to other cities including Rostov, Stavropol, Kabardino-Balkaria around the same region.

Victor Filippov, Head of Telecommunications Department, BCC, said: "With this large and important IPTV deployment happening in the South of Russia it was important to look at the best solutions available. Kasenna has local sales and support services in Russia and therefore understands the market here. More importantly, we chose them because Kasenna's IPTV solution is open, standards-based, flexible and scaleable and compatible with the network we are developing. Kasenna also provides advanced services, such as nPVR and content delivery tools, making it the ideal integrated IPTV solution for the anticipated future growth."

Robert Hopkins, Managing Director for Kasenna in Europe, said: "Telecommunications providers are constantly looking at ways to increase their revenues and are starting to bank on IPTV as a powerful value-added service that enables them to gain competitive advantage. Russia has become widely recognized as a huge growth area in the IPTV market. We are delighted Kasenna is part of this innovative project at UTK."

Evgeniy Rzhevsky, CTO, UTK, explained: "We believe that this new IPTV solution can greatly enhance our business proposition and value in the Russian market. This solution will allow us to optimize our network resources whilst providing the best possible viewing experience for our customers."

Kasenna's MediaBase is a high performance, scaleable video server platform that provides the underlying streaming and content delivery network for Video on Demand services as well as providing capture facilities for NPVR. Available for Linux operating systems, MediaBase XMP is the industry's first and only full-featured platform that handles deployment of video in multiple formats (MPEG-4, MPEG-1, MPEG-2), from narrowband to broadband to broadcast using open standards on mainstream computing hardware.

Kasenna's vFusion content distribution application is built to solve the challenges of operating and managing a video server network in a highly distributed architecture to offer ease of management and monitoring of the networked servers to reduce total cost of ownership.. vFusion centralizes all content management, content distribution, server configuration, and server management into a single application.