Espial Selected To Power Vodafone Iceland IPTV Services

Wednesday, August 31st, 2011
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OTTAWA — Espial® (TSX:ESP), a leader in On-Demand TV software and solutions, today announced they’ve been selected to provide an IPTV solution for Vodafone (LSE: VOD, NASDAQ: VOD) Iceland. As part of the IPTV solution, Espial is providing the following products: the Evo TV Service Platform, the Evo STB Client and the Espial MediaBase VOD platform. The Espial solution will power Vodafone Iceland’s IPTV service which provides broadcast TV, TV on-demand (TVOD), Catch-up TV and video-on-demand to over 25,000 customers. Vodafone Iceland offers mobile, fixed-line, and ADSL/ IPTV services to both consumers and companies.

  • Selected earlier in the year, Espial installed and integrated the solution in less than 6 months including initial testing and customer trials. Full-scale deployment is expected in Q4 2011 when Vodafone Iceland will roll out TV on-demand, Catch-up TV, Video-on-Demand and Broadcast IP TV services to over 25,000 customers.
  • Offering major CAPEX and OPEX savings, the Espial solution was seamlessly integrated with Vodafone Iceland’s existing eco-system components including:
    • re-using their digital rights management system;
    • re-using, upgrading and optimising the content delivery networking (CDN) and content workflow management systems;
    • integrating to existing billing and CRM systems;
    • retrofitting their existing STBs to provide a compelling new user experience.
  • The Espial STB Client is also being used to power next generation STBs from Amino to provide best in-class user experience. With its rich, standards-based authoring toolkits, it provides Vodafone Iceland the ability to customize, brand and extend their services to deliver a differentiated experience to TVs and multiscreen devices.
  • Vodafone Iceland chose to deploy the Espial Media Services Platform as part of its solution to manage their subscribers, services and promotions. With its low initial cost-of-ownership and ability to scale with growth in demand, the highly available system gives Vodafone Iceland the ability to easily integrate and customize capabilities to their future requirements. This will allow them to easily introduce TV Everywhere services for Vodafone Iceland’s customers using tablets, mobiles and PCs as the next step in their business strategy.
  • With the latest release of Espial MediaBase, Vodafone Iceland can manage their on-demand video library including movies and catch-up TV. Espial MediaBase provides a single multiscreen services platform to capture and ingest content, a unified content delivery networking platform and a combined HTTP/RTSP streaming solution.
  • For this solution, Vodafone Iceland chose to integrate Espial products with their existing Amino set-top boxes and SecureMedia (a Motorola company) digital rights management. This allowed them to maximize their original IPTV infrastructure investment while providing continuity for their IPTV customers.

“Espial offers powerful, open and high-performance products for IPTV services and TV Everywhere services. This has allowed us to retool our IPTV services while maintaining our existing ecosystem saving us time and money” said Kjartan Briem, CTO, Vodafone Iceland. “The Espial Media Service Platform, Espial STB Client and Espial MediaBase are world-class products we’ve selected to power our current IPTV services today and TV Everywhere services tomorrow.”

“Vodafone Iceland is one of the IPTV leaders in Europe and we’re honored to be chosen for their IPTV services. Their evaluation process was based on stringent requirements from lessons they’ve learned from years of delivering IPTV services” stated Robert Hopkins, Managing Director and VP Sales EMEA, Espial. “With our scalability, robustness and rich capabilities, we’ve helped them rapidly retool their middleware platform. We look forward to working with Vodafone Iceland to launch their advanced interactive television services over the coming months and moving to TV Everywhere services in the future.”