Frost & Sullivan presents the 2006 Market Leadership Award to Alcatel, in recognition of the company's success in defining the network architecture for the deployment of Triple Play solutions in the fixed telecom market. One of the world's largest telecommunications equipment vendors, Alcatel has developed a product portfolio and defined a network blueprint known as the Alcatel Triple Play Service Delivery Architecture (TPSDA), which has been widely accepted in the European marketplace and beyond.

Optibase Ltd. and SeaChange International will extend their product interoperability in support of IPTV services. Optibase will integrate its carrier-class media gateways with SeaChange's TV Platform, empowering Optibase's telco and hybrid network customers to deliver rich media over xDSL and other IP-based networks.

The Internet Streaming Media Alliance (ISMA) has begun work on a new specification addressing instantaneous and reliable channel tune-in and continues to solicit industry input on the topic. Fast channel change was identified as a vital Quality of Experience issue potentially affecting consumer adoption of IPTV at the recent Summits that ISMA held to discuss the state of open standards in the industry.

Companies that are not currently members of ISMA are invited to participate in the development of the new channel change specification as one-time auditors at the ISMA 23rd Member Forum, to be held Dec. 6 and 7 in Cupertino, Calif., at Apple Computer.

In off-topic news, a new survey of US and Canadian consumers found that all consider broadband "the communication service they can least live without," reports In-Stat. The survey breaks households by demographics and reports the same response across all segments. Survey results also give clues about how next-generation consumer applications, such as personal telephone numbers and address books, individual mail boxes, and user profiles, may redefine how we communicate through the personalization of traditional shared services, the high-tech market research firm says.

Stratacache has integrated its OmniCast content distribution software on the Amino family of set-top boxes (STBs), enabling the use of Amino devices as distribution points for corporate video in branch locations. With OmniCast integrated on Amino STBs, enterprises, banks, and retailers can enable live or on-demand corporate video access from branch locations. The solution powers applications such as distributed e-learning, corporate communication, and associate training.

Looking for something new? Check out these job opportunities at Minerva Networks:

• Director, Software QA
• VP of Professional Services
• Technical Support Engineer for Tier 3 Telecom Customers
• Senior Systems Performance Engineer

If you currently have open positions related to IPTV, Internet TV, or online video, please contact us with the title, job number, description, qualifications, location, contact information and any other details for the position and we will list it until it is filled.

"Triple-play" service providers today are faced with choices when it comes to distributing content around the customer's premises. A new research brief from ABI Research concludes that while Wi-Fi will play a large role in domestic triple-play distribution scenarios, it is not the whole story: Multimedia over Coax (MoCA), Home Phone Networking Alliance (HPNA 3.0), and HomePlug will collectively see 45 million total connections on STB and residential gateways shipped in 2011.

SES AMERICOM has integrated Harmonic's latest video encryption technology with SES AMERICOM's IP-PRIME IPTV distribution service. The new Harmonic ProStream 1000 with ProCipher AES scrambling and bulk descrambling technology is a key component of IP-PRIME, which enables large and small telephone company operators and broadband service providers across the U.S. to securely, easily and cost-effectively deliver a full lineup of top quality programming to consumers.

All West Communications, Inc., a provider of IPTV services in the state of Utah, has selected the Latens FCAS Conditional Access solution to secure its advanced IPTV services.

FCAS will integrate with the Entone VOD server and Hydra II multi-stream set-top box and with Minerva's iTV Manager, to provide an end-to-end IPTV solution.

Indiana's Rochester Telephone has selected TANDBERG Television as its video head-end provider for a new IPTV service over Fiber-to-the-Premise (FTTP) that will serve its Indiana ILEC footprint.

The Rochester Telephone agreement marks the 9th TANDBERG Television IPTV deployment in the state of Indiana.

Joining the ranks of YouTube and MusicNation, who are both holding online video contests, Yahoo! announced the "Yahoo! Talent Show," an eight-week online video contest dedicated to discovering original talent on the Internet. The contest starts today and an open call invites users to send in their submissions by uploading video clips of themselves demonstrating their best talents.

From skills in filmmaking and animation to stand-up comedy, pet comedy and performance art, Yahoo! wants to see people who have what it takes to get noticed by users and judges to become a "Web Celeb."

...and the list goes on and on.

While the focus of most recent debates has been IPTV vs Internet TV, I would like to divert and pose the question: With the emergence of so many online video options, how do we describe them all by name? For the most part, we still continue to place video under labels that have long been used because their behavior is much the same as those terms. For instance, are movie downloads over iTunes video-on-demand?

There needs to be some form of delineation. Or does there? If movie downloads are video-on-demand, how do we draw the line between traditional pay-per-view TV and iTunes?

AT&T reported strong third-quarter earnings today driven by revenue gains and margin expansion in wireless, merger-integration progress, and continued solid execution in wireline operations, including improved trends in business services. The results showed an earnings increase of 74 percent to $2.17 billion. Third-quarter consolidated revenues totaled $15.6 billion, up from a pre-merger $10.3 billion in the third quarter of 2005.

In the report, AT&T projects the first launch of HDTV over the IPTV U-Verse service to be in San Antonio in late November. According to AT&T, the initial results from a HDTV trial in Houston have proved to be positive.

The Los Angeles (LA) Kings are launching an online video portal for the new NHL season with its long-standing partner VirtuPoint.

Together, VitalStream and VirtuPoint will broadcast KingsTV, at www.lakings.com. KingsTV provides fans with coverage of live events including press conferences, pre-game build-up and post-game interviews. Hockey fans can watch interviews with players after morning practices and then see post-game analysis, press conferences and interviews with the coaches and players from both sides.

Starting today, AOL will offer consumers downloadable movies and television shows from Paramount Pictures through the AOL Video portal. AOL has already forged partnerships with other major movie studios including 20th Century Fox, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment and Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group.

Through AOL Video, a selection of movie and television titles from Paramount Pictures are available for download with prices ranging from $9.99 to $19.99 per movie. Once downloaded, videos can be viewed offline as well as on other PCs and compatible portable devices.