Japan: Plala Networks, NTT and Harmonic Inc.

Japan, one of the world's leading broadband nations, was an early adopter of IPTV, high definition television, video-on-demand and mobile video.

Plala Networks
Plala Networks, an NTT GROUP Company, is a leading broadband provider in Japan. Plala Networks operates one of the country’s largest Internet service providers (ISP) and is consistently recognized for its high level of customer satisfaction. In addition, Plala operates a platform business that completes the video, voice and data "triple play" by distributing IP-based digital TV and telephone services to customers of its ISP as well as those of other Internet service providers.

IPTV Launch June 2005
For several years, Harmonic has enabled leading broadband service providers in Japan to deliver some of the world's most innovative and advanced digital television services. Through its work with Harmonic, Plala Networks has launched the world's first commercial IPTV service based on Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), an advanced version of the existing protocol that offers superior quality of service (QoS), security and other capabilities. This was launched in June 2005.

Plala's digital broadcast television, VOD and Karaoke services are accessible to NTT East's growing base of broadband subscribers, currently encompassing approximately four million DSL and FTTP customers.

"There is great demand for new television services delivered over copper, fiber and wireless networks in Japan," said Mr. Satoshi Nakaoka, Director and General Manager of New Service Development at Plala Networks Inc.

"IP is a very reliable way to deliver the video, voice and data triple play over many different networks. Harmonic's flexible solutions and IPTV experience helped us break new ground by launching the industry's first TV-over-IPv6 service. That same expertise and system versatility will make it possible to expand our services, move from MPEG-2 to an advanced codec and take advantage of the many features of IPv6."

Plala and Harmonic
Central to Plala's new IPTV service is Harmonic's DiviCom MV 100 encoding platform. This makes it possible for NTT to deliver a competitive range of video, voice and data services over both DSL and FTTP networks. The compression capabilities of the MV 100 combined with its native IP interfaces make it particularly attractive to operators that need to deliver a wide range of television services over bandwidth sensitive networks such as DSL.

"NTT is well regarded for its technology and service innovation in telephony, data and video. Plala Networks continues the NTT tradition with IP-based broadcast and on-demand TV services that establish new industry firsts and will serve as a model for other operators around the globe," said Dr. Yaron Simler, President of the Convergent Systems Division at Harmonic Inc.

In addition to the real-time encoding of broadcast channels, Harmonic systems perform high-quality, ultra-low bit-rate storage encoding for Plala's VOD and Karaoke services. Traditionally, Karaoke services in Japan have used the MPEG-1 compression format, however, with this deployment Plala becomes the first broadband video operator in Japan to deliver a service based on MPEG-2.

Plala currently has a combined library of approximately 10,000 Karaoke and VOD titles.

For more information please visit http://www.harmonicinc.com