Motorola Inc. and Microsoft Corp. announced that the companies are extending their long-standing relationship for digital video solutions to include the emerging Internet Protocol TV (IPTV) market. The companies will collaborate to deliver a seamlessly integrated hardware and software solution designed to enable service providers worldwide to offer compelling, revenue-generating IP video services to their customers.

"You can think of us as 10,000 TV viewers crammed into a little black box," says Shenick Network Systems' co-founder Robert Winters. "Those 10,000 viewers have always been there, and we've now enhanced diversifEye so that it can also function as a single viewer's pair of eyes."

Shenick's diversifEye is a testing tool that ensures that the many systems that drive the Internet do what they're supposed to do. Constant quality testing of this infrastructure has always been important, and it is even more crucial now, with the emergence of so-called triple play services: the increasing convergence of voice, video and high-speed Internet -- and the growing risk of security attacks, which comes with it.

Infogate Online, a leader in software solutions for IPTV, video on demand and games on demand over broadband networks, announced that Scott County Telephone Cooperative, located in Gate City, VA., has selected Infogate Online's OnDema ^TM middleware platform to deploy IPTV services including TV channels, video on demand and pay-per-view to more than 6,500 subscribers in western Virginia and Tennessee.

IneoQuest Technologies and TANDBERG Television announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding at Supercomm that will strengthen the adoption of Video over IP technology for today's converged networks.

Expanding on its two-year lead in the GPON marketplace, FTTP forerunner Optical Solutions Inc announced another industry milestone: its 30th IPTV customer, Pioneer Telephone Cooperative of Oklahoma. Pioneer is the nation's third largest telephone cooperative, with more than 140,000 customers/members in 72 exchanges and 30 Oklahoma counties.

Kasenna announced the availability of PortalTV ^TM, a customizable turnkey application suite for delivering entertainment services over broadband networks. Recognizing the need for operators to provide differentiated service offerings to their subscribers, PortalTV offers a web services-based entertainment delivery platform which operators can quickly brand as their own and further customize according to their requirements. PortalTV brings the ease, flexibility, and power of web programming to the television world. The result is a revolutionary new way for telcos and other broadband carriers to develop and deploy IPTV.

Amino Communications announces availability of the AmiNET124 IPTV set-top box; the company's first set top box design to support the H.264 compression codec (also known as MPEG-4 AVC). Shipments to customers will commence in July.

Tut Systems Inc., an industry pioneer in enabling the delivery of next-generation data and video services over broadband networks, today announced that it is deploying what it believes is the first MPEG-4 AVC digital TV headend in North America at Farmers Telephone Cooperative, Inc. in Kingstree, South Carolina.

Texas Instruments (TI) announced that Amino Communications, a leading provider of consumer premises equipment (CPE) for broadband digital television applications, has chosen TI´s high-performance DSP-based TMS320DM642 digital media processor for its next-generation AmiNET124 IPTV set-top box, which includes support for the H.264 Advanced Video Codec.

IneoQuest Technologies, the Video over IP Quality Specialists ^TM, announced that Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc., a Kansas corporation, has installed IneoQuest tools for test and monitoring of its advanced IPTV network deployment across its 35 central offices throughout western Kansas. The IneoQuest test solutions provide Rural Telephone with the necessary 24/7 network visibility for ensuring video quality of service is maintained across all video streams.

Coaxsys, Inc., announced the availability of the TVnet/AC, an Ethernet-over-Coax adapter specifically designed for compatibility with the Amino Communications' AmiNET 110 set-top box. Coaxsys has developed this custom-fit home network specifically for the Amino line of STBs, as Amino is the most broadly deployed STB in this market.

SkyStream ®, a leader in IP video delivery solutions, announced at the SUPERCOMM 2005 tradeshow that Progressive Rural Telephone has selected SkyStream's Mediaplex-20 headend to deliver an IP-based television and music service across its access lines in central Georgia.

Telephone companies have the means to improve their competitive position by taking advantage of improved service creation platforms for delivering easy-to-use, highly customized interactive television and video services, according to a senior executive with mPhase Technologies, a pioneer in internet television (IPTV).

The shift from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 encoding and headend purchases is expected to begin in volume in the 2007 to 2008, meaning prolonged life for MPEG2 in IP TV systems. Moreover, the rise of IPTV content subscribers will drive an equally rapid installed based of IPTV video headends, according to a new report by Multimedia Research Group. Broadband service providers in the U.S., Asia, and Europe have announced or plan to announce deployments of IPTV-based content services, opening up opportunities for all video headend suppliers.

Incumbent phone companies are pushing IP-based video to the top of their next-generation service agendas, a strategic decision that is likely to have major long-term effects on the telecom equipment industry, according to a major new study released by Heavy Reading, Light Reading Inc.'s market research division.