So here's a roundup of the other key news in the telecom TV and video delivery world:
Until now, the vendor has only had trials with four as yet unidentified Asian carriers to talk about. Now it has an actual customer, CLEC SmartTel Communications, which will provide triple-play services over fiber to residential customers in Florida and Alabama.
UTStarcom's VP of strategic marketing, Jeff Paine, says the vendor has been working on mVision for years and has a number of patents. Paine is convinced that the only way to succeed in the IPTV sector is to "own or have significant influence over all the elements," handling the video and TV content, from the encoding to the customer.
To that end, Paine says his company has developed an entire end-to-end system. Its only partner is Harmonic Inc. (Nasdaq: HLIT) for its heavy-duty encoder.
"The piecemeal approach is a non-starter," says Paine, "especially from an OSS perspective."
Despite this, he reckons Siemens Communications Group has pulled together a good system with partners such as Myrio Corp., and that Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. is a company to watch in this space (see Siemens Gears Up for IPTV).
Myrio's VP of marketing, Roger Shanafelt, says the product update adds international languages as standard, an open API for linking to content security and digital rights management (DRM) systems, and a personal video recorder (PVR) module that service providers can download to set-top boxes that have hard drives.
He says the upturn in business this year has seen Myrio grow to more than 60 in staff, and that the vendor still has 15 positions to fill, mostly for developers. He adds the vendor has been engaged in RFPs with BellSouth Corp. (NYSE: BLS) and SBC Communications Inc. (NYSE: SBC) through its relationship with Siemens, but that Myrio is looking to strike other major partnerships to expand its contract-winning potential.
Other headlines of note from the past few days:
- BT Puts IPTV to the Test
- Nagravision Touts IP TV Security
- i3, Latens Collaborate
- Telstrat Demos Video Over GPON
- Minerva Unveils Video Blade
- Occam, Coaxsys Team for IPTV
- Calix Struts at TelcoTV
- Optical Solutions 'Solves' IPTV Issue
- Tut Shows Off IPTV Security
- Kasenna Unveils Streaming Tech
- MatrixStream Demos VOD System
- France Telecom Teams With Thomson
- ETI Automates FTTP Provisioning
- Latens Integrates With Amino, Entone
— Ray Le Maistre, International News Editor, Light Reading
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