EchoStar announces the company's IP-Prime Conversion Program, designed to provide continued delivery of video transport services for telco IP headend facilities across the United States. Commercial transport provider IP-Prime has previously announced it will discontinue its video transport service to headend facilities by July 31, 2009. EchoStar's IP-Prime Conversion Program provides qualified customers with EchoStar's ViP-TV transport service, replacement IDC satellite receivers and a standard professional installation, including compatible LNBs, a satellite dish re-point, cabling and connectors.

EchoStar's ViP-TV transport service delivers a secure, MPEG-4 encoded IP stream of approximately 250 channels of popular, broadcast quality TV channels from a satellite located at 85 degrees W.L. In addition, ViP-TV can provide local TV channel aggregation in the telco's DMA in both high definition and standard definition (where available).

EchoStar will demonstrate the service at Satellite 2009 booth #597 at the Washington Convention Center, March 25-27.

ViP-TV provides a complete set of design and integration services to build a fully provisioned IPTV system for telcos. EchoStar also offers flexible choices from market leading suppliers of conditional access systems, subscriber management systems, video on demand, emergency alert systems, electronic program guide, ad insert systems, boxware (middleware) and set-top boxes ranging from entry level to full featured standard definition and high definition digital video recorders.

ViP-TV's suite of channels includes the following:

• ViP-Premier, offering approximately 110 of the most popular TV channels;
• ViP-HD, boasting approximately 42 channels of industry-leading high definition programming;
• ViP-Movies, presenting a menu of approximately 39 channels of the most popular movie services;
• ViP-Latino, offering approximately 38 channels of top-rated Spanish-language programming;
• ViP-International, providing approximately 23 channels in multiple languages.