(Second in a series, read Part 1 here)

It’s a well-known fact that independent telcos pioneered IPTV in the U.S.--but it’s also true that many of those pioneers found themselves hamstrung at a certain point in their deployment by lack of content or lack of advanced features.

This year at NXTcomm, smaller and independent telcos are going to find much of the technology for which they have been waiting is on display on the show floor, including new competitors for their business and new end-to-end IPTV solutions.

In the latter category, SES Americom and the National Rural Telecommunications Association are teaming up on IP Prime, their end-to-end IPTV solution that has been in beta trials with rural telcos and is shortly to be a commercial offering. And Falcon IP/Complete is exhibiting what it calls “Bird to Box” television.

Both companies are delivering MPEG-4 compression, a significant factor for rural telcos as they try to deliver more bandwidth over longer loops.

“We spent three years developing this solution, and we are now starting to deploy,” said Don Cook, CEO of Falcon. “We are doing it from the satellite all the way to the set-top box. We have our own in-house engineering, installation and tech support, and we can do the DSLAMs in the access, and all the integration.”

At the core of his system is Thomson/Grass Valley technology that has been widely deployed in Europe, including the SmartVision middleware and Thomas MPEG-2/MPEG-4 set-top boxes.

“It’s well-tested and well-integrated,” Cook said. “This is MPEG-4, ready to roll.”

IP Prime has been tested by its beta customers and is very close to commercial launch, said Bryan McGuirk, president of media and enterprise services at SES Americom. His company will be showing two end-to-end ecosystems, one built around Myrio middleware, NDS conditional access and Scientific Atlanta set-top boxes and the other using NDS middleware and conditional access delivered to an Amino set-top box.

Being able to mix and match vendors is important to rural telcos, to “future-proof” their deployments, he added. “It creates a competitive market that allows our telco partners to really choose best of breed,” McGuirk said. “That’s what our open standards platform has been about from the beginning.”

In addition, multiple middleware vendors that do work with smaller service providers will be on hand, including Grass Valley, Kasenna, Minerva, Seachange, and Siemens/Myrio, indicating there are many more choices for IPTV players today.