Ixia launches IxRave a patent-pending end-to-end remote Quality of Experience and service validation platform. IxiRave enables carriers, service providers and enterprises to actively isolate faults, verify that end-customers are receiving services and that such services are working according to SLAs, and then continue to remotely monitor their networks. Bell Canada worked with Ixia to deploy remote testing capability for rolling out triple play services on its network and achieved payback in just one year. Ixia will demonstrate its new end-to-end remote quality of experience and service validation platform on stand number 144 at IPTV World Forum in London, March 12-14.

TIVO reaches an agreement with YouTube to offer access to YouTube videos directly from the TV via a TiVo DVR. The service will be available later this year to broadband-connected subscribers with TiVo Series3 DVRs, including the new TiVo HD.

Every day hundreds of millions of videos are viewed on YouTube and hundreds of thousands of videos are uploaded. Upon launch of the TiVo-YouTube service, TiVo users will be able to search, browse and watch these videos directly on their television sets through their broadband connected TiVo DVRs. The combination of having the YouTube experience with the convenience and familiarity of TiVo's intuitive user interface will provide TiVo subscribers with the ability to discover and enjoy the most shared and most discussed web videos in the world on their televisions. Importantly, users will be able to log into their YouTube accounts directly from their TiVo boxes and access their favorite YouTube channels and playlists.

Hulu.com's public launch is just hours away from now and sparking lots of interest throughout the internet. Since their private beta registration nearly 5 months ago, Hulu has attracted over 5 million people. Hulu also announced additional content from Warner Brothers Television Group, Lionsgate, NBA, NHL and twenty other content providers.

However, will this be enough to keep people coming back to Hulu.com?

Hulu.com is promising public access to the site starting Wednesday, March 12th.

The University of Houston and AT&T announce the nation's first planned deployment of AT&T U-verse services into student housing on a college campus. The cutting-edge TV and high speed Internet services will be included in every room of a 547,000-square-foot residence hall under construction for graduate and professional students.

The Calhoun Lofts, next to the University of Houston's C.T. Bauer College of Business, will contain more than 700 one- and two-bedroom apartments with 1,000 AT&T U-verse connections, along with 10,000 square feet of retail space. School officials chose IPTV as the next-generation video service best suited for the university's next-generation living space.

Dailymotion and My Damn Channel announce a partnership that will bring My Damn Channel's original, professionally-produced episodic video content to Dailymotion's audience of over 49 million users worldwide.

Beginning Tuesday, March 11, 2008, Dailymotion will host an exclusive premiere episode of My Damn Channel's newest web series, "Bedtime Stories." Written and co-directed by Steve Kerper, whose previous work includes infamous sketches such as "Raging Bullwinkle" for HBO's "Hardcore TV," each episode of "Bedtime Stories" will offer a provocative retelling of a traditional children's story. The show stars web video cult personality and one-time pole vault medalist Grace Helbig and features illustrations by Asterisk (Saturday Night Live's "TV Funhouse").

NEC will launch full-scale IPTV business with high-profile NGN carrier applications. Providing End-to-End IPTV solutions and video delivery systems to communication carriers, NEC will expand this business to the international market. The company will draw on its NGN know-how and extensive experience with broadcasting technology to deliver highly competitive solutions predicted to generate 50 billion yen in sales by 2010.

NEC intends to adopt the following initiatives to accompany full-scale introduction of the new services.

CBSSports.com has dropped its registration requirements for NCAA March Madness on Demand, giving immediate access to the video player to a large network of sites across the Internet. CBSSports.com has created a Developer Platform, located at http://www.ncaa.com/mmod/developer, giving sites all the necessary tools and information to link directly to live streaming video from one of the world's most popular sporting events.

NCAA March Madness on Demand will be available at NCAA.com as well as links on CBSSports.com, the CBS Audience Network, sites for CBS television and radio affiliates, online video leader YouTube, other major sports websites such as ESPN.com, Yahoo! Sports and SI.com and leading social sites like Facebook.

The NCAA March Madness on Demand promotion on Facebook is part of the recently launched "CBSSports.com Tournament Brackets" application on Facebook Platform. Located at www.facebook.com/brackets, CBSSports.com Tournament Brackets is available to the site's more than 67 million active users both online and via CBS Sports Mobile, creating a cross platform experience for all NCAA basketball fans that should drive tremendous traffic to NCAA March Madness on Demand.

Verimatrix's Video Content Authority System for IPTV has been deployed to secure VOD premium content as part of TUS TELEKOM's IPTV offering.

Through the advanced application of Internet cryptography, including Public Key Infrastructure and X.509 digital certificates, VCAS offers much higher levels of content protection than traditional smartcard systems and automatically identifies security breaches. VCAS for IPTV is designed for two-way networks and has been integrated with Dreampark's middleware and Envivio's headend equipment for the TUS TELEKOM platform.

TUS TELEKOM is a telecommunications provider operating an ADSL network within Slovenian territory, offering the service on two networks; its own and on an incumbent network. Its IPTV service is a response to the growing demand for entertainment and is available initially on the TUS TELEKOM network.

Advanced Digital Broadcast has been selected to supply IPTV STBs to SeaMobile. ADB's advanced WAV-2500W units are enabling SeaMobile to deploy interactive, digital video services on their client's cruise ships - the new services will allow guests to access a wealth of video and interactive entertainment services including IPTV and VoD.

The contract marks another achievement in ADB's progress in the IPTV market in North America, where it has already supplied IPTV products to over 90 independent operating companies. It also marks the company's first incursion into the at-sea marketplace.

Harmonic's new DiviCom Ion AVC standard definition encoder has successfully completed encoder conformance testing for the Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV and multimedia software platform. The test was administered by Microsoft as part of the Microsoft Mediaroom Interoperability and Qualification Lab program, which is intended to enable the ongoing interoperability and compliance of encoders used in deployments of Microsoft Mediaroom. A Microsoft Mediaroom ecosystem partner, Harmonic powers the video headends for a majority of Microsoft’s IPTV customers. Harmonic delivers over 5,000 broadcast video channels around the world to more than four million IPTV subscribers, and counts more than 100 telco operators as its customers.

Edgeware announces that the Nordic tier 1 telecom operator TeliaSonera has deployed the Orbit 2x server system to deliver on-demand TV and video services to its rapidly growing IPTV subscriber base in Sweden. Edgeware's distributed server architecture enabled TeliaSonera to cost-effectively integrate on-demand capabilities into its existing network, and to deliver new services to its 300,000 subscribers in record time.

The architecture is based on Edgeware's Orbit 2x, which is a high density, high performance and ultra low power consumption video server appliance. Each Orbit 2x hosts up to 3 TB of flash memory content storage and is capable of reliably streaming 20 Gbps to more than 16,000 concurrent users from anywhere in the network. The TeliaSonera installation consists of both central and edge servers, hierarchically distributed throughout the country, and managed by the Origin remote management system. Content is automatically distributed by Edgeware's Convoy asset propagation system. The installation automatically ingests video content from multiple providers and performs time shift of live TV channels at virtually zero latency.

Tandberg Television's OpenStream Digital Services platform has been fully deployed by Multimedia Polska to power its entire on-demand VOD services.

Multimedia Polska has over 600,000 customers and is one of the leading Polish providers of triple-play, combining hybrid cable/IPTV television, broadband internet and fixed-line telephony in a single package. The VOD service is a critical part of the Polish operator’s deployment of a major, advanced multimedia offering. Programming includes a broad line up of movies, sports and entertainment and is available either via free, subscription, transaction or ‘time-shift/catch-up’ services. Multimedia Polska also launched a HDTV offering last year using Tandberg Television encoding and future plans will see the operator introduce more advanced, revenue generating services such as mobile TV.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of “US Cable TV Operator Survey: Competition Reshapes the Industry” to their offering.

Cable TV operators in the United States continue to invest in their networks and roll out new services. A key reason driving this investment has been the increasing competitiveness of the US pay-TV market.

The introduction of telco TV services by companies such as Verizon and AT&T, coupled with the growth of satellite TV service providers, like DirecTV and EchoStar, are pushing cable operators to develop new revenue streams, while at the same time, hang on to their existing video subscribers.

In order to see how US cable TV operators plan to counter this emerging competitive threat, we recently surveyed 50 US cable TV systems operators about the status of their cable systems. We asked the cable operators over 60 questions about their current systems, and this report provides the results.

Verimatrix announces the availability of ViewRight PC Player 2.0 a next-generation IP client application that incorporates advanced DVR functionality, mirroring the best time shifting features on TVs. Consumers are now able to perform popular trick play functions on live premium IP broadcast streams and record up to four simultaneous programs. As the industry's only independently-audited secure client, ViewRight PC Player PC player enables pay-TV network operators to offer premium content packages across a range of home network devices, while also creating new revenue streams with tiered pricing.

The Verimatrix ViewRight PC Player turns any broadband-connected PC into a fully functional, interactive IP client that complements the use of STBs in today's networked household. ViewRight PC Player can display Standard Definition and High Definition MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 content, which is protected by Verimatrix VCAS security and can be paused, rewound and recorded through an intuitive user interface. Recorded streams retain the full VCAS encryption, ensuring they remain protected and subject to operator playback entitlement.

Telefonia Bonairiano “Telbo” has selected the Amino AmiNET125 multi-codec STB to power “mitv”, the first IPTV service in the Caribbean island of Bonaire over ADSL2+ network.

This innovative IPTV service was developed by Telbo N.V., Savant Communications N.V. and Manycast Consultancy Inc. and is considered to be the showcase model for the Telbo partner telecom companies, covering an additional 24 countries.

The AmiNET125 deployment offers Telbo the opportunity to provide subscribers an enhanced IPTV platform, which goes beyond traditional triple-play services. The AmiNET125 platform is specifically designed to help operators in emerging markets introduce IPTV services with a flexible and cost effective approach.