The Kudelski Group announced that its NAGRA Media Multi Operator Service Delivery Platform (SDP) has won the prestigious 2009 InfoVision Award from the International Engineering Consortium (IEC). The awards honour some of the industry's most notable broadband products, services, and applications and were presented at the Broadband World Forum Europe 2009. The platform has been developed by Quative and is being provided by Nagravision as a cornerstone of the NAGRA Media IPTV Solution. Quative is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Kudelski Group focused on products for hybrid IP deployments. The solution won the award in the category of "Content, Entertainment, Applications, and Services". The NAGRA Media Multi Operator SDP provides a highly effective and affordable IPTV solution for smaller networks. The multi-operator capability allows the achievement of economies of scale across multiple deployments, thus significantly lowering the investment threshold for each individual deployment.

The NAGRA Media Multi Operator SDP broke new ground in the industry by being the first of its kind to be fully deployed in the field. The solution is based on a centralised NAGRA Media SDP, which brings three significant benefits to operators connected to a central service platform providing a hosted service: they no longer require their own MPEG-4 broadcast headends, nor their own middleware platform nor security system.

"At this stage of maturity of the IPTV industry this multi operator capability is well on its way to becoming a crucial enabler for smaller operators to launch competitive IPTV services," Sebastian Kramer, CEO Quative Limited. "This centrally hosted service approach is significantly more cost efficient from both an OPEX and a CAPEX point of view, and is ideally suited to serve smaller local operator networks with a limited number of subscribers where conventional solutions would be prohibitively expensive."

"The IEC’s InfoVision Awards give tribute to the top broadband technologies in deployment today. We’re pleased to recognize Nagravision as a Winner for its NAGRA Media Multi Operator SDP in the Content, Entertainment, Applications, and Services category,” commented IEC President John Janowiak.

The NAGRA Media Multi Operator SDP supports a number of different subscriber management systems (SMS) and different emergency alert systems (EAS), covering those which are most common in the specific market segment. This allows local operators to be instantly integrated on the platform because of these pre-integrated backend systems.

The platform includes an embedded content management system (CMS), the NAGRA Media CMS, which has been integrated with numerous EPG data feeds and video-on-demand (VOD) content platforms. Operators are provided with their own web based management interface to select online which linear or on demand content packages they want to publish on their network. Further, the operator can rebrand the advanced browser-based user interface. This means that the operator is truly able to manage its own subscribers, including not only access to content, but also the UI look and feel. This combination of low investment threshold through centralised deployment with full flexibility to locally manage and differentiate the service is unique in the industry at this point.