Kasenna Lights Up Clarksville Electricity Dept. with IPTV

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

Tennessee Electrical Utility Deploys Advanced Television Services with Kasenna LivingRoom and MediaBase

SUNNYVALE, CA — Kasenna, The IPTV Company™, today announced that the Clarksville, Tennessee Department of Electricity (CDE LIGHTBAND) has deployed a new digital video service based on Kasenna LivingRoom™ middleware and MediaBase™ video servers. The new video service, called CDE LIGHTBAND Lightband, is a triple-play offering that features 200 channels of high-quality digital video, an interactive programming guide, and video on demand service along with 10Mbps Internet and telephony services.

With this deployment, CDE LIGHTBAND becomes one of the leaders of a new trend for utilities to reduce operating expenses and leverage their infrastructure by offering new services to subscribers. CDE LIGHTBAND was interested in deploying fiber to properties in its service area near Nashville in order to implement automated meter checks. With a network proposed, however, the utility realized that it could drive new revenues by adding triple play services to the network. In a citywide referendum held in late 2006, the CDE LIGHTBAND plan was approved by 72 percent of voters.

“Deploying triple play services is a great way for a utility like ours to provide a needed service in our community while making the most of our infrastructure investments,” said Christy Batts, Telecommunications Marketing Manager for CDE LIGHTBAND. “Kasenna stood out among the IPTV companies we considered because its LivingRoom middleware solution allows us to easily brand and customize the TV user interface and to add valuable services such as RSS feeds for local news.”

CDE LIGHTBAND began offering services to initial subscribers early this year and the service is now available to some 5,000 homes, with full deployment to all of the city’s 55,000 homes and businesses expected around the end of 2008. While the subscriber response rate has been outstanding, CDE LIGHTBAND has been careful to announce service availability only as the build-out is finished so that it can provide an immediate response to customers who want to subscribe.

“Public utilities around the world have begun considering offering IPTV as a way to improve revenues by offering a desirable service from a trusted local provider, and the Clarksville Department of Energy is a textbook case of how this strategy can succeed,” said Vivek Pendharkar, president and CEO of Kasenna. “Kasenna’s LivingRoom and MediaBase products offer these utilities a turnkey IPTV solution that delivers scalable, high-quality service in an easily deployable package.”