May 15, 2008
Westby, WI - While large national telephone companies announce their rollouts of digital TV services in larger metropolitan areas, several rural Wisconsin independent telephone companies have been providing the leading edge triple-play combination of entertainment, information and communications services to their residential and business customers for years.

Three Wisconsin companies, Midwest Telnet, based in Westby; Tri-County Telcom, based in Strum; and Wisconsin Independent Network, based in Eau Claire; have joined forces to start Midwest Video Solutions, LLC.  Midwest Video Solutions provides IPTV headend services to other telecommunications companies.

Headend facilities are critical, capital-intensive elements required for deploying high-quality video services to subscribers.  By coordinating the video signals from two existing geographically diverse downlink facilities and transporting the aggregated video streams to other providers over a redundant fiber optic network, Midwest Video Solutions offers a robust IPTV video signal solution that can be very cost prohibitive for a single telephone company to build on its own.  

With over 200 channels of TV and digital music to choose from, video service providers have a wide selection of content that they can choose to offer by working with Midwest Video Solutions. An expanding line-up of High-Definition (HD) channels helps when competing with traditional cable companies and satellite providers.  Adding additional channels down the road becomes less of a hassle in terms of capital investment and implementation timeframes.

Midwest Video Solutions has sixteen video service providers already receiving signals from either of the two individual headend facilities.  Transport of the video signals is not limited to Wisconsin or the Upper Midwest; one international site receiving the video signals is the U.S.'s Yokota Air Force Base in Japan.

With seven years of experience in providing digital TV signals over telephone networks, along with thirty years of analog video system experience, Midwest Video Solutions has resources knowledgeable in not only the technical aspects of providing high quality video services, but the marketing and administrative aspects as well.

Midwest Video Solutions will have a display at the Wisconsin State Telecommunications Association Spring Conference in Lake Geneva on May 21 and will be marketing its services at various venues in the future.

For more information regarding Midwest Video Solutions, contact Marty Snustead, Executive Director, at 608-634-6901.