National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative's Forrer: IP-Prime to go prime time

Today, FierceIPTV presents coverage of the opening keynote, graciously presented by Madeleine Forrer, vice president of Video Services for the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative. Forrer elaborated on IP-Prime, the long-awaited IPTV platform developed with smaller telcos in mind.

IP-Prime goes prime time

Madeleine Forrer is unphased by IPTV naysayers.

"In 1994, if you would have said DBS would become as ubiquitous as cable, you would have been laughed out of the room," she said. "We believe IPTV will become the third great competitor.

Television delivered via closed network in an Internet Protocol format has variously been presumed to be "buggy, expensive or even impossible," she said.

Rural telcos, however, are making it work, and one NRTC member is leasing hi-def TV sets to its subscribers, she said. Others are among the first TV providers deploying MPEG-4 set-top boxes.

"IPTV is setting the tone for what can be done and viewers want to be done," e.g., bringing together localized content, video-on-demand and even online video, she said.

Forrer delivered the keynote address at IPTV Evolution in Los Angeles today, the opening day of ITExpo at the city's convention center. Forrer's perspective comes from spending more than two decades in the TV space, from launching channels on cable systems to acquiring programming for a set-top startup. She's now vice president of the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative located in Herndon, Va., where she secures programming deals for IP-Prime, a turnkey, MPEG-4, IPTV platform for small telcos.

IP-Prime, a joint effort of SES Americom, the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association and the NRTC, was launched at a telco site Monday, Forrer said. Details will be released Monday, according to a spokeswoman at NRTC.

IPTV FOR ALL

Forrer said that when the rural telco lobbies met with SES Americom, the goal was "to find a way to take a multimillion dollar problem and scale it down to a manageable size … We had to make IPTV accessible to telcos with 10,000 access lines, 5,000 access lines, 2,000 access lines."

The result was IP-Prime, one of a handful of IPTV platforms that allows telcos to launch the service without having to install a head-end or other costly infrastructure.

"This is ideal for companies in initial stages of IPTV," Forrer said. "We believe we've come up with a solution that works incredibly well in our marketplace, all the way up to 100,000 subscribers."

Forrer said telco plants meeting certain technical criteria can go from voice to IPTV service in 16 weeks with IP-Prime. SES, NRTC and NTCA provide everything--marketing, training, operational support, video, platforms and set-tops.

"IP-Prime is as close to turnkey as you can get," she said.

The system uses Scientific Atlanta set-tops and Myrio middleware. Some telco operators, notably Keith Galitz of Canby Telecom in Canby, Ore., have had problems with Myrio. Forrer said the IP-Prime group is also working with NDS Metro and Minerva, or IP-Prime can simply provide program drop-off if a telco wants to build their own head-end and use their own middleware.

The programming-only package is also available for MPEG-2 providers or others with existing head-ends.

Forrer said a DVR-enabled set-top would be available shortly, and a video-on-demand service within a few months.

"We're also talking to walled-garden providers about local weather, news, games … all delivered to TV screens," she said.

Forrer said she envisions a model where online video can be accessed on TV. Any content that crosses a telco plant "is well-suited to deliver to the set-top box."

Forrer concluded with a quote she attributed to avionics engineer Charles Kettering, who invented the electric starter, "We have a lot of people revolutionizing the world right now because they've never had to present a working model."

She also noted a survey that indicated 25 percent of American consumers are ready to check out IPTV when it becomes available.

"So here we are," she said. "We're in the place where telcos can compete with cable."