Amid rumors of AT&T mulling an acquisition of EchoStar, BellSouth and satellite operator SES Global said they inked a deal to trial IPTV. The satellite company will provide the carrier with video aggregation, encoding, monitoring and transport over the IP Prime platform. BellSouth began technical trials of IPTV technology with Microsoft last year; SES said the company plans to expand those trials to market trial participants using the additional MPEG4 encoded programming channels delivered by IP Prime. SES said its IP Prime allows for plug-and-play integration with a broad swath of infrastructure platforms.
For more on SES and BellSouth's IPTV trial:
- see this article from AFX