Amino, leading IPTV software and consumer premises equipment provider, has taken another step towards making IPTV deployments easier and more efficient for Telcos. The company today confirmed that the award-winning H.264 AmiNET124 IP set-top box is fully compatible with the industry's leading H.264 (otherwise known as MPEG4-AVC) encoders. By ensuring full interoperability and high quality video rendering via the AmiNET124, IPTV service providers can deploy advanced H.264 services using any of the major encoding technologies within a much shorter time-frame.

The AmiNET124 was launched in June 2005, and in September won the Broadcast Engineering Pick Hit Award at IBC for its innovative, single-chip design and advanced performance, which lowers the cost of IPTV deployments. Prior to, and in the months following its launch, Amino has worked closely with both the leading middleware and encoder providers to ensure that the AmiNET124 is fully compatible with all elements of the IPTV system. Amino is pleased to announce that the set-top box has been certified to interoperate with H.264 encoded video from Harmonic, SkyStream, TANDBERG Television and Tut Systems.

"The AmiNET124's optimised software stack helps ensure that the picture quality of highly compressed digital video, such as that produced by Harmonic's DiviCom MV 100, is preserved across the IPTV delivery chain," said Thierry Fautier, Director of Telco Solutions Marketing at Harmonic Inc. "Validating and optimizing interoperability between our DiviCom MV 100 MPEG-4 AVC-enabled video encoder and the AmiNET124 expands the range of top quality, ready-to-deploy solutions available to IPTV service operators."

"Advanced compression technology is crucial in enabling operators to launch new IPTV services over bandwidth constrained networks. To truly deliver with high quality, advanced compression solutions need to be optimized from the video head end all the way into the home and we are delighted to support Amino as it brings MPEG-4 AVC innovation to the set-top-box sector," noted Tim Sheppard, IPTV Business Development Director, EMEA and APAC for TANDBERG Television.

The AmiNET124 is the company's first H.264 compatible set-top box available for Telco IPTV deployments. Cavalier Telephone, a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) in the USA and one of the industry's first commercially deployed MPEG-4 AVC IPTV solutions, has already selected the AmiNET124 for its IPTV service roll-out. "Amino has achieved a rapid time to market along with high quality with their AmiNET124 product," explained Mark Tiedeman, Vice President of Marketing for Tut Systems. "The market for MPEG4-AVC IPTV is growing very rapidly and by closely partnering with Amino, we can provide the most advanced services to our customers."