From head-end to set top box, it all worked. All eyes were on the television in the living room of this Fairfield home when Auroras Entertainment successfully demonstrated its end-to-end MPEG-4 IPTV service. Delivered via 3 Rivers Communications DSL facilities, it confirmed what Auroras and 3 Rivers have long believed, that an aggregated MPEG-4 IPTV solution would work and would bring the benefits of IPTV to telco customers of both large and small telephone companies.

"MPEG-4 compression technologies allow so much more in the way of bandwidth, but the systems are still new and relatively untried in the real world. We have worked long and hard to achieve the integration necessary to successfully deliver MPEG-4 IPTV services over telco DSL facilities," explained Diane Smith, CEO of Auroras. "That we watched IPTV today in a living room in rural Montana says so much about the potential of IPTV services for the telecom industry." 3 Rivers Communications, seeing the potential of IPTV services for their customers, has been working with Auroras to launch this first field trial. "We were pleased to host Auroras' field trials here in Fairfield. We utilized DSL conditioned copper telephone lines for delivery and the quality of the MPEG-4 IPTV signal was excellent. We were also able to test the service over two different DSL platforms, so we know it works with multiple infrastructures," explained Darren Moser, General Manager of 3 Rivers Communications. "3 Rivers is glad to be this close to the commercial launch that will deliver the best, next generation IPTV video services to our customers."

To achieve today’s launch, Auroras had to successfully integrate DVB-S2 satellite transmission, its master head-end operations, MPEG-4 encoding, middleware, set top boxes, and a host of other technologies. New technologies and platforms will be tested and added as soon as practicable.

Auroras will also roll-out field trials with additional customers in the upcoming weeks. Mike Kazmier, President and CTO of Auroras said, "We sought field trials with different infrastructures and different carrier profiles. That way we develop a greater understanding of any system weaknesses and we can speed to solutions so that our customers gain the swiftest, highest quality IPTV services available. IPTV just opens up a world of possibilities for telcos and their customers. It’s great to see it lighting up in living rooms."