TOP STORY: Local Governments Question Statewide Video Franchises Business: Motorola Completes Modulus Buy On the Front Lines · Brix Watches Live IPTV · Optibase Checks In at Vancouver International   Airport · Wayport Hopes for Hotel Reservations · Verizon Secures Two FiOS TV Franchises One-Liners

This weekly e-mail newsletter covers everything related to Telco-IP Television.

 

Laws moving video-franchising authority to the state level now exist in 21 states (including Illinois, where the governor is expected to sign the bill pending there), but the laws, promoted to speed franchising by competitors, have not accelerated deployment or lowered prices, asserted TeleCommUnity, a alliance of local governments promoting their role in franchising.

Gerry Lederer, an attorney for Washington, D.C., law firm Miller & Van Eaton , which advises cities, said in a telephone briefing with reporters Friday that Verizon Communications continues to negotiate with local communities for franchises, earning 810 over the past two years. That success runs counter to arguments, made to state legislatures, that local negotiations are a barrier to entry necessitating state legislation, he added.

Despite the passage of bills designed to speed competition in states where AT&T is the primary provider, that company has failed to launch its U-verse TV video service in one-half of the states it services where it has gotten relief from local franchising rules, Lederer said. What the drive for state franchising has really been all about, he asserted, is "not serving two-thirds of households" in those states. Lack of build-out requirements will allow competitors to move only into neighborhoods that will be most profitable to them, plus just enough low-income communities to satisfy terms in some state laws, local officials asserted.

The telephone call was scheduled to give local governments' view of trends in the structure of statewide bills and whether the legislation represents improvements over previous regulatory regimes.

In Lederer's judgment, language of the bills has improved as more states take up the issue. For instance, the Ohio and Illinois bills prevent competitors from meeting deployment obligations with old technology like direct-broadcast satellite services in place of fiber-to-the-home or IPTV services, he said. More bills are specifying customer-service standards and designating what officials have enforcement oversight, he added.

Negotiators "stumbled" on bills in Kansas, Indiana and North and South Carolina when defining "gross revenues," he said. Definitions there require that franchise fees be paid on "all revenue generated by a subscriber" -- a definition that represents only 70% of an operator's revenue, as it does not tax advertising earnings or launch fees, among other things. Bills this year (except in Nevada) had broader definitions of gross revenues, which generates more revenue for cities and states, he added.

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Motorola completed the acquisition of privately held Modulus Video, a provider of video-compression systems designed for IPTV providers, for an undisclosed sum.

Under the terms of the deal, announced May 17, Modulus will become a wholly owned subsidiary and integrated into Motorola’s Home and Networks Mobility business. Motorola intends to maintain Modulus’ operations in Sunnyvale, Calif.

Modulus, with about 57 employees, provides MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding compression systems. Its customers include AT&T, Bell Canada and CenturyTel.

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Brix Networks is letting service providers continuously monitor live, broadcast IPTV video streams.

BrixVision Live Monitoring monitors and analyzes live video streams at critical service-demarcation points within the delivery network, such as headends, regional hubs or local video-serving offices.

The tool provides different views of IPTV performance, including operational monitoring, service-level-agreement compliance, installation verification, troubleshooting and customer care.

For example, the BrixVision dashboard can alert network-operations staff to service degradations or outages, and it reports current video quality and service-performance indicators. The software’s reporting feature lets providers graph performance of individual channels and locations by comparing more than 40 collected quality metrics.

Other vendors that provide video-monitoring systems include Mixed Signals and IneoQuest.

Brix, based in Chelmsford, Mass., was founded in 1999. Its core product offerings are voice-over-IP quality-measurement tools for service providers.

The company said BrixVision Live IPTV Monitoring is available now; pricing varies based on the “scope and scale” of a network operator's deployment.

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Optibase installed its H.264 IPTV solution in Vancouver International Airport, where it will be used to stream TV channels and airport announcements to plasma TVs located throughout the airport terminals.

The airport expects to serve 17.5 million passengers this year. “With a growing numbers of passengers expected this year and beyond, we are always on the lookout for new ways to make their travel experience more pleasant,” Vancouver International Airport vice president of simplified passenger travel and chief information officer Kevin Molloy said in a prepared statement.

“The large flat-screen displays present a wonderful opportunity to do so,” he added. “However, high-quality video is required. Optibase was the obvious selection to achieve this goal. Their advanced IPTV platforms deliver broadcast-quality video, enabling us to continue to expand and adapt to meet the needs of our travelers.”

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Wayport announced that its Entertainment-on-Demand -- IP based HD video-on-demand, gaming, Internet and interactive services integrated with TV -- is now available to hoteliers.

Wayport “designs, develops and enables software and applications over carrier-grade networks for innovative organizations in a number of vertical markets encompassing retail, healthcare, hospitality, managed services and others,” the company said in a prepared statement.

The company added that it will provide a customizable interface that can be changed on a per-hotel or per-room basis.

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Verizon Communications’ FiOS TV won two more video franchises last week. The telco will compete with Comcast in Bedford, Mass., bringing its total number of communities in the state to 50. And Verizon will take on Cablevision Systems in the Rockland County village of Spring Valley, N.Y., placing FiOS TV in 45 New York communities.

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• IMAKE Software & Services said the latest version of its OpenVision Session Resource Manager is now integrated to the industry's leading original-equipment-manufacturing players: Cisco Systems, Motorola and Sun Microsystems.

• China Telecom Shanghai deployed additional TX Matrix and T640 core routing platforms from Juniper Networks to optimize its next-generation IP network.

• Rim Semiconductor said its newest patent pending technology, RQAM, will be used in its upcoming Cupria Release 1.6, adding that RQMA can move data faster, across longer distances of copper wire and with a much lower bit-error rate, than its previous technology, employed in Cupria Release 1.5, could.

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