Having waded through the release on Soft at Home made this week, which documents the creation of a French joint venture for software in the home between Orange, Thomson and Sagem, it is hard to see that anything important has happened.
The aim appears to be to steal the high ground in selecting software for digital entertainment in the home. But just what software are we talking about here?
Well there are an increasing number of software stacks in the home, but the first mentioned by name in the statement is the IPTV middleware stack that manages communication with servers in the network and in the IPTV set top. The announcement tries to suggest that this is the most installed piece of IPTV middleware in the world, with the freshly named SmartVision offered by Thomson. The truth is that this software was written for France Telecom by Thales to create MaLigne IPTV over a period of years and then sold in 2005 to Thomson for $155 million.
This move appears to be trying to build a European eco-system around it and to open up the software for third party development, a move that Microsoft has just started on its own Mediaroom IPTV middleware.
You can assume that with that sale from Thales to Thomson went some assurances that France Telecom would continue to use the IPTV middleware, co-ordinate requirements through Thomson, and pay per set top for every device that was attached. For its part Thomson would turn it from a monolithic block of code into a real package, and make it maintainable, in much the same way that Alcatel has converted Imagenio into MyView and will now merge it with the old OMP middleware that Alcatel had before it came across Microsoft Mediaroom.
And part of that is to get other companies interested in adding new IP based services around the home.
The Thales acquisition gave Thomson VOD server capability, IPTV and mobile TV content delivery and management, video-over-IP test and measurement technology and quality of service (QOS) analysis tools for IPTV and also for mobile TV and in October last year it added its own VoIP integration, which virtually completes the software that is worth putting on a set top. These moves now are designed to catapult Thomson into the next generation IPTV services, offering content from the same sources in different formats for TVs, PCs and handsets, delivered over a variety of wireless and fixed networks.
Thomson can now merge broadcast systems, head-end encoders from its Grass Valley company, its own compression technology, remote management systems, ad insertion systems, IP-enabled set-top boxes, and home gateways with its Cirpack VoIP Softswitch acquired in April 2005. It is also planning to pre-integrate its back end service delivery platforms so that operators can add sophisticated voice and video features which interact and are aware of each other over DSL networks.
Thomson SmartVision TV now offers live TV, picture in picture, VoD, network personal video recording, and caller ID on TV for incoming calls, browsing of call history with click to dial, activating call forwarding, configuring black lists or selecting musical ring back tones on the TV. Thomson says the same core network platforms can manage mobile devices for telephony such as dual mode Wi-Fi-GSM phones and mobile video devices such as 3G phones or DVB-H receivers.
What we think this new deal is all about is that Thomson, one of the biggest satellite, DVB-T and IPTV set top manufacturers in the world, is opening all of this to rival Sagem, not really known for set tops, despite the release saying that it is one of the world’s leading set top builders ‘ it simply isn’t, having more history among home and wi-fi gateways and of course handsets.
The point is to start suggesting that the Thomson software stack is a standard, and to be fair it is just as much a standard as Mediaroom or the Alcatel systems or the Nokia Siemens Networks Surpass/Myrio systems. But by having a second source of supply, and one that can also open up the mobile dimension like Sagem, means there is a software eco-system which is far more extensive than France Telecom has installed at present, and which will bring together its 6 million Livebox dual mode home gateways with its IPTV systems.
For the two vendors it gives them a united front when approaching companies outside of France or even the existing France Telecom rivals within it.
The truth is that handling a multicast join on an IGMP network is an art, not a science, and any one of 60 different makes of IP set top handle it differently, all Soft At Home promises, as far as we can see is that Sagem and Thomson will handle it the same and use standards where they exist. Ditto for the formats for storing voicemail, talking through middleware to network servers, and perhaps as far as how conversion works on various PC video and audio formats, and how wireless carries this traffic around the home.
The release said that Soft At Home facilitates deployment and interoperability of for instance, enabling access to photos stored on a computer on a TV, making a telephone call using the TV remote, and storing multimedia content. The idea is also to open up those systems to other players in the sector, so that telecommunications operators, third-party developers, OEMs and manufacturers, can all buy into the code, which sounds as if it will have to be at the source level or at least the STK level, in much the same way that in recent month’s Microsoft Mediaroom has begun to open its own software and STK for Mediaroom developers. Failure to do this might have left France Telecom and Thomson isolated.
Soft at Home will be owned 60% by the France Telecom unit and 20% each by its equipment partners, be embedded in Orange decoders and support existing industry standards such as the Linux operating system, SIP protocol and H.323, as well as specifications from the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), UPnP (Universal Plug & Play) Forum, DSL Forum TR-69, Open IPTV Forum, and Home Gateway Initiative.