Israeli IPTV middleware company Orca, now owned by France Telecom’s Viaccess, has landed an OEM IPTV deal that will take its RiGHTv software into Russia, with BCC Company, a system integrator there. The Orca system has already been deployed by Russian incumbent operators North-West Telecom, Siberia Telecom and Southern Telecommunications Company.
This is Orca’s second step into Russia and the joint wholesale system will offer on-demand content, authentication and reporting through a super-headend based in Moscow.
BCC will put together offerings including localized content, user interfaces, EPG and will also use Orca’s service delivery platform which can adapt to various business models.
Michael Talov, BCC Vice-President, said: ‘BCC has wide experience in the field of development of innovative solutions, especially IPTV. BCC has 800 employees with offices in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnodar, Novosibirsk and Yekaterinburg.
For years IPTV has been sneaking into Russia via this type of partnership, primarily because most companies don’t have the political connections to operate trouble free in Russia and so need to partner. Back in April 2007 Orca landed its first middleware contract with Russian integrator Open Technologies, which built a service for Sibir Telecom in Novosibirsk offering TV, radio channels, VoD and network PVR.
IPTV specialists like set top company Amino did much the same, licensing its designs to a Russian company Intercom rather than enter Russia directly with an up front license fee plus royalties and last month one of Russia’s largest broadband suppliers Comstar-Direct took iPlex transcoders from Tandberg for its IPTV head end in Moscow to implement H.264 encoding.