Timing of North American availability for the new system is unknown

In a move to expand its business into international markets, Japenese vendor NEC announced the launch of its IPTV business today. On display at this week’s IPTV World Forum, the end-to-end IPTV platform and video delivery system targets carriers using an IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) architecture.

In April, the vendor released a video-on-demand server that will serve as the core system for its new IPTV applications. The platform will use CASCADE’s QualiTVision middleware, currently deployed in Hong Kong and Thailand, to enable time-shifting, network PVR and interactive services.

The service will make its way to the states sometime this year, said Nick Satomi, vice president of business development for NEC America. The company plans to go public with the system at the NXTComm conference in June.

NEC will focus on direct sales in the US, relying on its history with existing carrier customers. The North American market will not be a primary focus, however –at least not yet. NEC’s strong presence in Japan still hasn’t translated to the US, where interest in IMS technology is not as strong. Satomi expects initial deployments to start in Asia, giving the US time to get more comfortable with the technology.

“Everybody is discussing IPTV,” Satomi said. “Everybody is playing with something in this marketplace. However, our direction is to see IPTV services placed on top of IMS core networks. IMS core networks are not popular yet in this country. We have to see the combination of the IMS and IPTV all together in the next couple of years.”

IMS offers the promise of value-added services for the end customer, including e-commerce, targeted advertising and unified communications features, Satomi said. NEC already has developed and deployed IMS products but thus far has focused on IP and VoIP to get off the starting blocks for large-scale IMS deployments. IPTV over IMS is a logical next step, according to Satomi.

“IMS has a lot of good features, and the reason why we use IMS as a platform for IPTV services is to give them some flexibility and also some strong features,” Satomi said. “So to give you some capability to reduce the capex and opex as well. IMS has a lot of features, a lot of content in there, however, it will take a little more time for us to see real penetration in the North American marketplace.”