Santel replaces STBs with live streaming service via Innovative Systems

Santel Communications, a long time IPTV provider in South Dakota, this month announced that it has launched a full-channel live streaming service for its cooperative customers in central and southeast areas of the state. The new streaming service, provided by Innovative Systems' MG-TV Live Streaming platform, will also provide Santel the opportunity to promote its fiber internet offering and move customers into higher speed packages that also includes the coop's managed Wi-Fi service.

Santel delivers high-speed internet, digital television, wireless and business services and serves approximately 4,000 members in central and southeast South Dakota. Santel is also a part owner of SDN, a statewide fiber network that connects Santel to the world and provides business-class services to major enterprises, government agencies and wireless networks throughout South Dakota and the surrounding states.

According to Santel's general manager Ryan Thompson, the desire of the cooperative's board of directors is to continue providing video service for its members, of which approximately 2000 of whom subscribe to Santel's IPTV service. Thompson said that, in South Dakota, Santel has been able to keep video delivery at a profitable level, and for this reason, its board wanted to invest in the delivery of live streaming to future-proof the product.

He added that another reason for implementing the new streaming service delivery platform relates to aging set-top boxes, and the coop's ability to shift the customer into using its streaming device as a replacement. Thompson said that, over the next two years, simply switching customers over to their Amazon or other consumer device versus conducting a truck roll to homes for streaming service upgrades, will be much easier for subscribers, and much less expensive for Santel as a company.

With over eight hundred deployed systems, Innovative Systems is a vendor of products and technologies for North American communications and utility providers. eLation, the vendor's BSS/OSS offering, includes integrated billing, provisioning, mobile apps, financials, and mapping capabilities. MG-TV is the vendor's one-platform approach to video solutions such as Middleware, VOD, Cloud DVR, Restart TV, HLS Live Streaming, and Conditional Access capabilities, as well as set-top boxes. Meanwhile, the company's APMAX platform supplies enhanced voice and hosted business services.

Thompson said he believes that customers desiring multiple OTT services like Paramount+, Hulu, Netflix, and Disney+ have caused a lot of Santel's cooperative members to realize that a service such as the coop's newly deployed SmartStream, as furnished by Innovative Systems, offers much of that same content on one platform, with one bill. He further opined that stockholder pressure on the national OTT providers to start making money is creating increased parity when it comes to pricing, which according to Thompson will make their local service more price competitive.