Latens Systems said it has landed a deal with Midwest TelNet, a consortium of 13 independent telcos in southwest Wisconsin, to provide its conditional access solution as part of Midwest TelNet’s IPTV service.

The group has selected Latens’ FCAS Conditional Access solution, which will be integrated with Amino’s AmiNET110 and AmiNET500 set-top boxes and Minerva’s iTV Manager middleware. Midwest TelNet currently provides all 13 carriers with a video feed, which is then marketed by member companies to consumers.

With the addition of Laten’s CA solution, which encrypts video stream from the headend to the end user, the consortium is now offering secured MPEG-2 streams to each member.

“We chose Latens because they have an enviable track record in real-world deployments and offer a complete and flexible solution that satisfies our ambitious service offer in the short and long term,” Rodney Olson, General Manager of Vernon Telephone, a member company of the Midwest TelNet consortium said in prepared comments.

Latens CEO Jeremy Thorp said the company has been starting to sign on more and more consortiums as customers. The groups, which can range from just a few carriers to several hundred, require only some adjustments to the vendor’s platform.

“Sometimes you’re in a situation where each of the operators might want to have his own subscriber management system,” he said. “Also each operator might want a different channel line-up. The central [conditional access] system needs to be able to talk to each of those systems and aggregate that in a way that’s invisible to the customer.”