SES Americom is all systems go this week as it declared the commercial availability of its IP-Prime satellite-based IPTV distribution system. After successful trials with several rural telcos in cooperation with the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative, the system is now available to all North American telcos.

SES Americom supports two models of service. Telcos can opt for a managed service where SES Americom manages content delivery all the way to the set-top box on behalf of the telco or an unmanaged service where the telco takes the satellite feed and manages the last mile distribution on its own.

The company demonstrated its service with a live satellite feed to McCormick Place and two versions of a set-top box in its booth at NXTcomm.

IP-Prime delivers over 275 channels of programming today, including 20 high-definition channels. It has more content relationship agreements in the works.

“We provide a new medium for content companies to reach out to new markets,” said Jon Russo, senior vice president of marketing and product management for SES Americom.

It does so with its carrier-grade headend, a choice of consumer set-top boxes and multiple middleware solutions, including Myrio and NDS. The company says it is the first to bring an end-to-end, satellite-based television service to market built completely on the MPEG-4 video standard.

“Some telcos have already invested in MPEG-2 compression technology, which does not future-proof their investment. We can take the headache out of transitioning to MPEG-4,” Russo said.

IP-PRIME comes with existing transport agreements for over 275 television channels and over 100 digital music channels. In addition to the 20 high definition stations, SES Americom supports pay per view programming and the ability to offer video-on-demand service. It has several interactive features it will be releasing soon.

Steve Bing, senior vice president of the NRTC, said SES Americom gives its member companies the easiest path to a very comprehensive and technically advanced television service. And Michelle Abraham, principal analyst of converging markets and technologies for In-Stat said IP-Prime minimizes the risk of a complex technical integration and simplifies difficult program acquisition challenges for small and large telcos.

Although the company is still developing or working through the permissions for new interactive services, Russo said that with its ecosystem partners in place, its breadth of programming and both its managed and unmanaged options available it was time to launch.

“We said we are ready because we are,” he said.