Amino secures Estonia MPEG-4 HD PVR agreement

Estonian IPTV provider, Elion, will spearhead the first roll out of Amino’s PVR STB solution

Amino Technologies (LSE: AMO), the world leading IPTV platform supplier, has today signed a landmark agreement that will see its new MPEG-4 High Definition (“HD”) based Personal Video Recorder (“PVR”) Set-Top Box (“STB”) play a key role in the expansion of Estonia’s IPTV market.

Elion, the largest telecommunications and IT provider in Estonia, has reached an agreement to use Amino’s AmiNET530 Set-Top Box to offer premium services to its consumer and business IPTV subscribers. Based on state of the art MPEG-4 HD technology, the AmiNET530 will enable Elion to provide tiered triple-play services with additional channels and HD TV and PVR services. Elion will begin introducing the PVR capabilities in November, with the HD service following later in the year.

Elion first partnered with Amino in 2006 when it launched Estonia’s first ever IPTV deployment using the AmiNET110 STB. The number of Elion digital television users increased 16% on the first half of 2008, reaching 67,700 by the end of Q2 2008. This accounts for 17% of all households using TV services in Estonia.

“Having launched Estonia’s first digital TV offering and its only digital video rental package, we want to continue to bring more services and greater value to our customers,” said Margus Kurm, Head of Product Development at Elion. “Following the success of the initial IPTV deployment and the work that has been done integrating our middleware, Amino was an obvious choice to facilitate this. It gave us the shortest route to market, as well as future-proofing our STB network for further upgrades.”

“The tiered model Elion is building reflects the way added-value IPTV services are growing in many of the emerging markets where our foothold is already strong,” said Andrew Burke, CEO at Amino. “This is our first deployment of the AmiNET530 and an evolution of our relationship with Elion – enabling it to more effectively gain value from its triple-play service and offer customers wider choice.”

The AmiNET530 is an advanced, compact and cost-effective PVR IPTV STB, which combines the benefits of low bit-rate codecs including MPEG-4 Advanced Video Codec (AVC) and offers the user the ability to drive HD displays via analogue and HDMI connections. This advanced interactive STB also includes the ability to view recorded content either locally or via other connected STBs in the home.