The roster of vendors auditioning for a lead role in the IPTV market got decidedly more crowded last week, as suppliers of all sizes announced acquisitions and alliances at the Telco TV Conference and Expo in San Diego.

Calix, which was tapped as one of Sprint's suppliers for its next-generation broadband access network last month, dove into the Gigabit passive optical network (GPON) market with the acquisition of Optical Solutions Inc. Because of its ability to offer even greater bandwidth than broadband PONs, GPON, which has been deployed generally only among independent telcos, is emerging as a critical technology for carriers wanting to offer the triple play of video, high-speed data and voice services.

The deal brings together the dominant provider of GPON to independent operators with one of the more aggressive access vendors in the same market. However, according to Carl Russo, president and CEO of Calix, the agreement is more than a market-share acquisition play.

“The number one reason for this isn't GPON,” he said. “It's that with OSI, you plug it in, and it works.”

For OSI, the Calix deal opens the door to much larger carriers, said Mike Dagenais, president and CEO of OSI, who will have an unspecified management role in the new company.

“We were looking at how to grow into the larger multi-state independents,” he said. “We were very comfortable with our technology, but it was a matter of scale.”

The merged company will have plenty of competitors. Nortel Networks, which has had a strong alliance with Calix, last week named its “ecosystem” partners as Harmonic and Optibase for encoding, BitBand and Kasenna for video-on-demand servers, Orca and Minerva for middleware, and Espial for operating systems.

Nortel's take on the telco video market relies heavily on its ability to tie service back to bread-and-butter communications packages.

“We're trying to take some of the complexity out of it,” said Walt Megura, general manager of Nortel's broadband group. “We're looking at a packaged offering that has gone through a very robust test process.”

Ultimately, the company is trying to make the video piece of its service access-independent. Nortel already has developed a plan that would allow carriers to use WiMAX for that access piece.

“I don't think people appreciate the complexity of this,” Megura said. “Remaking the access network is a significant part, but there are things above and beyond that.”

Among the most significant pieces that carriers have struggled with in the past is content and the development of headends. And not surprisingly, content aggregators have started joining the alliance dance. SES Americom, the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative and the National Telecommunications Cooperative Association used last week's event to unveil a partnership targeting the smallest telcos.

Branded as IP Prime, SES will provide a centralized, satellite-delivered IP video stream from its Vernon Valley, N.J., facility. Going over the company's AMC-9 satellite, telco customers must purchase a video hub, which will receive the signal and then move it to the carrier's access network. The goal is to give those telcos without the resources to build a headend a shot at the IPTV market, said Bryan McGuirk, president of media solutions for SES Americom.

“It's being driven first and foremost by the members [of NRTC and NTCA],” he said. “The members were desperately asking for an add-water-and-stir solution.”

However, not every carrier — nor every vendor — believes alliances must be created this early. Lucent Technologies, which just started publicly talking about its video play a few months ago, believes carriers still hold the keys.

“We do have a set of partners that we try to keep in the development loop,” said Marcus Weldon, chief technology officer of Lucent's broadband solutions group. “But service providers still have quite a bit of say who they have in their network. You may be forced down a path by those customers.”

OSI's customers

SureWest Communications

Primelink

Rural Telephone/Nex-Tech

Federated Telephone/Hometown Solutions

Guthrie Center Communications (Iowa)

Borough of Kutztown (Pa.)

Reedsburg Utility Commission (Wis.)

FTTH Communications