BREAKING: Broadstream to merge with Auroras

I heard from a reliable industry source that tomorrow Auroras and Broadstream will announce their intention to merge. The merger marks a significant consolidation for the IPTV space--it will pit the newly formed company squarely up against SES for delivering satellite programming using MPEG-4. My source says the big advantage the Auroras-Broadstream company will have over SES, is that the signal/channels will be taken back to the baseband before encoding in MPEG-4, which should give a 25 percent better picture than SES can deliver. The new company will be headed by ex-Intelsat and Broadstream executive Jon Romm. Stay tuned to FierceIPTV for more on this story as it develops. Auroras is a wholesaler/integrator in the IPTV space and has a solution that delivers everything from headends, DSLAMs and middleware. Broadstream provides managed IPTV network services, content management platforms and affiliate rights and marketing support services. The company operates all digital virtual head-end systems. UPDATE: A credible industry source had a clarification: "Related to your comments on the advantage of Broadstream/Auroras over SES…I can tell you that SES does bring the signal to baseband (encoded by Sci Atl AVC encoders I've been inside the headend in NJ myself) and so does Auroras (with an Auroras branded AVC encoder). So the assumption is wrong. And, in fact, maintaining the digital signal through a process of transcoding actually helps maintain quality levels as signal brought to baseband and re-encoded can suffer from interference and make compression decisions based on less original content information."