NMEA new guys #2, Intellian

You may have seen the full page ads in the boat mags; there’s a new player in the marine satellite TV business, Intellian Technologies, and if nothing else they clearly understand that they must make their case well to make a dent. They certainly didn’t mess around at the NMEA Conference; aside from a booth, they set up a suite with many of their initial seven (7!) products running live. That’s company CEO Eric Sung and U.S. Sales Director John Minetola above, shortly after they showed me some goodies…

At the modest end, and not quite in the photo above, is the i1, claimed to be the world’s smallest marine sat TV system at 13” high and about 10 pounds. I wiggled it around some and it seemed adept at staying locked on, and also looked neatly put together inside. Note that unlike KVH’s original M3 system, which did great in my testing, the Intellian does not come with a combined satellite and DirectTV controller. But that may be a good thing as it’s turning out, no fault of KVH, that the Dish Network is the best play for smaller boats that want HD TV. That’s because DirectTV decided to move its HD channels to the Ka band instead of using the Ku band that it and Dish have traditionally used. KVH, Sea-King, and maybe others suddenly had the problem, not trivial, of adopting to Ka, plus some unhappy customers.
   At any rate, Intellian’s second claim to fame is the very first system that can purportedly handle DirectTV’s dual band broadcasting. It takes a second 24” dish and a dual controller, but it can switch around amongst five satellites, and seemed pretty quick about it. Sung and Minetola are also quite proud of the controller’s 8 receiver outputs, which apparently eliminate a gaggle of splitters. Intellian will be at FLIBS next week, and will be hosting another demo open at least to writers (contact Bear Marketing).