Any statement that says that it will bring standardization to IPTV, but which doesn’t include either Alcatel or Microsoft, is going to sound suspect. So my inbox was full this week of people from all over the industry with subject lines such as ‘What no Microsoft?’ when everyone heard about the creation of the Open IPTV Forum.
Also only one of the Microsoft customers was included, but it was the biggest of them all in the form of AT&T, so that immediately makes us wonder if perhaps there are is some level of discord continuing between AT&T and its IPTV suppliers and it is seeking standards outside their technology.
The full list was AT&T, Ericsson, France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Siemens Networks, Sony, and Telecom Italia and its mission is to work towards an interoperable end-to-end specification for delivery of IPTV services.
That mission itself is perhaps even more cause for alarm. Why should IPTV be interoperable in any way with another vendor’s IPTV, and of course it doesn’t have to be. Instead perhaps here we are talking about interoperability between different services within one operator and as such it might be about format conversions and billing commonality using IMS type services.
Yes but if so where is Nortel and IBM, or Lucent for that matter, all famed for their implementations of IMS and you’d expect handset makers such as Nokia and Motorola to be important members (ok Samsung is there but still).
Another massive omission is Cisco, which has recently begun innovating at the IP and router level for IPTV channel switching and VoD serving. It is also making contributions to IMS architectures and owns set top maker Scientific Atlanta.
And the inclusion of Panasonic, Philips, Samsung and Sony seems to suggest that this is really about TV sets, and perhaps the elimination of set top functions from a separate device, and integration into TV sets. Because none of these companies, with the possible exception of Philips, have any business in the IPTV space.
Where are Orca, Thomson, Kasenna, BitBand, Seachange International, the DRM suppliers, both conventional in Irdeto, NDS, Motorola, and Nagravision, and the new ones in Latens, Widevine and Verimatrix and others, and the set top makers in Amino, Tilgin, Pace. These companies and many others have built the IPTV community, and established its working standards so far. And where are the encoder makers in the form of Tandberg, mid-acquisition by Ericsson, along with Harmonic, Optibase and Modulus. Also missing is Apple, although given its approach to proprietary technology, we’re not too surprised at that. Ditto Qualcomm.
Where too are the tier one networks in Europe, many of which have embraced Microsoft technology in British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom as well as those that haven’t in Telefonica, Fastweb and the Scandinavian operators. Also if this is really about interoperability with other services such as mobile, where are the mobile operators? And where are the Far East representatives that would make this truly global such as Huawei and NTT DoCoMo or the US content majors such as Disney, Paramount and Fox?
IGMP and MPLS and VPLS are the IP services that have all been quietly developed over the past ten years to enable IPTV, set top browsers and middleware and VoD and encryption, many of which are perfectly acceptable standards, just not standards for interoperability.
It looks to us like this is another talking club for only very large companies and the oddest one out appears to be Ericsson. Not only has it no offering in IPTV, not at least until it completes its acquisition of Tandberg, but it has nothing in mobile TV, except for internal experiments.
The only other telecommunications equipment supplier listed is Siemens Networks, soon to be merged with Nokia networks operations and running as a merged entity from April 2007. Nokia has a few DSLAM products, but prior to acquiring the IPTV operations of Siemens had no interest in IPTV.
Take away the TV and DVR manufacturers and the largest, but potentially alienated Microsoft customer AT&T and we are left with France Telecom, a company that shares R&D with Alcatel and which has sold off its own IPTV middleware to Thomson, and Telecom Italia, which began its IPTV life as a Microsoft customer, but which has instead opted for an older Alcatel software system.
Reading between the lines and without any external confirmation yet, this looks like an Ericsson initiative which is designed to give it a step into IPTV markets though the backdoor of its strong implementation of IMS and a yet to be revealed strategy for mobile TV converged with IPTV.
Lots of news sources attempted to get Microsoft and Alcatel to confirm whether or not they had been invited to join and this is still not nailed down. Microsoft, we are sure, would have joined if asked, as it has a habit of joining most standards clubs and has a foot in both camps with IPTV, a cable version of IPTV, a mobile offering, its Connected Services Framework which sits above IMS and is a member of the Mobile DTV Alliance for mobile TV.
One thing that may have stopped these organization from joining, if indeed they have been asked, might be because the organization may embrace open source platforms for set tops and other devices, which would go against the grain, at least at Microsoft.
Despite the European weighted membership list, the Forum will be embracing standards that can be applied globally and it aims have a first draft of architecture and protocol specifications ready by December 2007.
We shall see over the coming months just who joins and what their roles are. Will smaller companies have a voting role? Will those with proprietary offerings be allowed in? Will the major rivals to Ericsson get a look in? Our feeling is no for all three.