In recent years it has been fairly easy to go to IBC and test the temperature of the IPV market by visiting one or two middleware companies and the odd set top vendor. But this week at Amsterdam’s annual broadcasters’ conference, the complexity within IPTV markets testified to a maturing of the various missions which make up the sub-sector today.
This was not purely about who is winning the middleware or set top or conditional access wars ‘ this was more about three or our core themes, and just where each proponent was planning to apply their TV technology know how ‘ was it to the core issue of bringing higher and higher definition of visual quality to IPTV, or perhaps just the network quality issue, of making sure that not just a network, but a popular TV channel, received 99.9% uptime.
Another big theme was about how to push to either two or three screens ‘ with all the systems which were pushing down this route talking about 3 screens, but many strategies resting entirely on how to deal with the PC and the TV only, with scant mention of the handset, as if it were an afterthought.
Advertising certainly reared its head, but nothing which looked complete in its vision and clearly this will be a constant theme that innovators bring to this show over the next few years.
But the one overwhelming message appeared to be that IPTV is alive and well and that by embracing all these new directions there was more room for everyone, and that most players were far more happy than they were back when Microsoft in one single year annexed far too many of the European tier 1 telco accounts, leaving scant room for any of the remaining players to be comfortable.
Among all of this there were other sub-themes relating to channel personalization and content recommendation and for technologies which have become hybrids and which are chasing the big European love affair with DVB-T and other broadcast technologies.
There is also emerging the beginning of a genuine structure to the politics to IPTV, something highlighted to us by Quality company IneoQuest. ‘The companies which supply the network gear are only focused on five 9s (99.999%) quality for their own network equipment. They never think in terms of quality for a TV channel,’ said Stuart Newton, General Manager of EMEA Operations with IneoQuest.
IneoQuest says that is now has 300 customers, and is one of the best known quality advocates for video on IPTV networks. It builds a system of monitors which check on the integrity of IP encapsulated MPEG through every stage of its journey to the consumer, peeking at individual video streams or a 300 channel multicast, using specialist FPGA chips to carry out deep packet inspection and brings all the data together for analysis. Newton was showing off a handset web page that was offering monitoring by TV channel, letting operator management know if the winning goal in the football tournament it had paid $100s million to show, is lost in a visual artifact, due to some network problem.
But as such it can’t be too popular with the Alcatel’s of this world that can prove their network is up 99.999% of the time, but can do little to ensure that this 0.001% isn’t the cup final goal.
IneoQuest is starting to see itself as providing the data to referee turf wars and eliminate finger pointing among dual IPTV suppliers.
‘When customers ring in and say that their IPTV HD stream has had persistent glitches, the man in charge of the IPTV mission in a Telco needs the weapon that will let him prove that his service is behaving within the bounds of his service level agreements, and if they are not he wants to know which system to blame and how to fix it,’ said Newton.
Symmetricom with network health monitoring and traffic flow tools and Digital Fountain with its FEC were also in evidence and now form a standard part of these shows attacking visual quality, and BitBand, really the original VoD supplier to Fastweb, was also showing its quality innovations in something that seems like a cross between the Microsoft Mediaroom D server with packet resend, and also fast channel change for multicast systems. ‘Yes very like Microsoft,’ said CEO Ervin Leibovici, ‘except we manage it with about a tenth of the number of servers as Microsoft,’ talking about the BitBand QualiCTV line of servers which can work with any VoD platform. BitBand was also pushing its intelligent CDN system which automates the movement of content towards the edge of an IPTV network.
We had always said that if the IPTV community did not catch up with the advertised capabilities of Microsoft Mediaroom in a few short years (i.e. by the time they were stabilized within the Mediaroom products) then it deserved to go under. It looks like it has managed to keep up after all.
Curiously throughout the entire show, with several thousand large flat HD TV screens, all too rarely that quality discussion was undermined by the actual quality of the video on the stands, and there were two exceptions ‘ the Move Networks demonstration as a Microsoft guest on its stand, which of course was over the web video, and one TV we saw which was very high level video produced by an Ateme encoder, which wasn’t even on the stand.
The Move networks demo was really a relative experience ‘ it looked like all the other stands when in fact it was web TV, and not Quality Controlled IPTV, so it looked really good for PC content. The Ateme demo, hidden in its meeting room was something else though ‘ a 60 frames per second encode at 1080p in 4:2:2 8 bit color.
Sure there are some 4:4:4 encode systems on their way, and 10 bit byte color and perhaps they might sit on better screens than Panasonic plasma, but this particular piece of encoding just reminds you of what it is all about ‘ the absolutely fidelity of visual experience, which mimics reality. This was a 30 Mbps stream, and it was designed to show off the FPGA based Ateme encoder systems and not really part of any existing IPTV service that is already out there. But when we can all watch TV like this, there will be little left to innovate in this sphere. Sadly that day is a long way off.
Similarly there was something haunting about every single graphical interface we saw on all these HD screens ‘ the graphics just were not up to the job, because they were SD graphics on HD screens ‘ except at Dreampark, the Scandinavian IPTV middleware firm that has added something called scalable vector graphics so that the graphics doesn’t have fuzzy edges and they suit the HD pictures. So far it is working with 1080i on the ST Micro 7109 and it doesn’t have 1080p working yet ‘ but then again no one else in IPTV seems to either. But similarly no set top with SVG graphics has shipped yet, so what it was showing on its stand was a prototype.
Dreamworks also talked about how flexible its middleware has become with some 12 customers now, and how it had managed to act as the middleware to TV networks that include DVB-C, DVB-S as well as DVB-T. The DVB-T system was in Spain at TV Almansa which remarkably uses DVB-T modulation down its existing cable plant, instead of QAM. There’s always one.
Given that the Dreampark UI looked so good with SVG it was odd that the Orca front end, looked so shabby. It quite simply had spent all of its time ensuring that its Compass next generation EPG worked properly, that it forgot that attention to detail on its graphics. We saw the Compass for the first time last year and today, while Orca is now a subsidiary of France Telecom’s Via Access, it still has to implement it at a client.
The Compass is the concept of a favorites list bundled with a recommendation engine, which is designed to replace the standard grid that is the basis of TV channel selection virtually everywhere. It is an L shaped set of screen icons which offer VoD recommendations up the screen and broadcast ones across the screen. As promised last year the new version allows a different compass for each person in the household, and if you don’t like the set of recommendations on show you can refresh it with its second attempt or program it from the web.
The Compass was the first output of the NeGeV consortium that was announced two years ago which sees Israeli academics with $20 million of funding from the Israeli government, working with Comverse, Scopus Video Networks, encoder specialist Optibase, SintecMedia, Orca Interactive, Mobixell Networks and VoD server specialist BitBand.
The Compass has been extended to include a link into Facebook and potentially to other social networking sites, and the clever way that each individual sets up his own Compass is with a thumb print on the remote controller (we kid you not). Fingerprint recognition means that when little Johnny is not at home, mother can’t look at his recommendations or his social networking comments, unless she cuts off his thumb and keeps it there.
This social networking side to Compass allows recommendations to come out of social networks and from other viewers, so they may include programs that people would like to see on the VoD system, and this can be aggregated back to the operator so that they can then source popular requests.
Viewing recommendations can be sent to friends as can photos and even VoD rights can be sent as gifts to others, and all of this can appear on the simple L shaped Compass interface. Orca expects to begin installing Compass at two operators that have ordered it during early 2009.
Aprico was the other company that stood out as offering recommendations through what it calls a personalized channel. Aprico is a joint venture company with Axel Springer providing EPG data and content know how and Philips, the technology. The idea is that each member of the household can create one or more channels for themselves, beginning by simply choosing to watch a program.
The recommendation software is embedded into set tops, and looks at up to 80 separate characteristics, the company says, which includes all the major ones like actors, genre and director. Initially the system can only recommend things similar to the original channel, and it automatically records them for the viewer, who can either watch them, reinforcing the selections or ignore them, and it will delete the recommendations. The personal channel gets better by simply viewing content and attaching it to the channel, so you could create an action channel, a film channel and a news channel of your own, but it works best if you give the programs scores and other feedback, so it can require some effort.
The system has been in testing for 3 years, which to our way of thinking, in this day and age, is way too long, taking in 4 person households from different social backgrounds. The system came in for some publicity earlier this year when it was announced to work alongside the Microsoft Media Center software, to select content from a pre-selected list of qualifying web sites, in the same way. Now the company says that it took set top maker Amino just 6 weeks to implement it on their set tops and that it will be marketed across all IPTV set tops.
Another thing that is starting to become embedded into set tops (layer upon layer of complexity there) are watermarking systems. Cinea’s system was on show at IBC and it is a watermarking system that is independent of the conditional access system, and claims that the Widevine Cypher DRM which has been bragging about watermarking for years is actually based on a license acquired from Cinea. The company began life, as the name suggests, putting watermarking into films distributed to digital cinemas, but is now targeting IPTV set tops and has implementations with NDS and Conax and it runs on the latest ST Micro and Broadcom set top chipsets.
Cinea told us that the whole idea behind studios suddenly embracing watermarking is to enable a new exploitation window which sits between theatrical release and DVD release, and that experiments like the Sony Pictures release of Hancock direct to Bravia TV sets, will use the technology to see if that version of Hancock turns up in the wild. If not it will encourage more and more studios to experiment with early release.
There was very little on the IBC floor that related to getting a TV signal around a home – we didn’t come across MoCA or HPNA in any force, but there was a small booth for Universal Powerline Association chip leader Spain’s DS2, which is now picking up some success after years in the wilderness, besieged by standards problems and a war against the US driven Home Plug system. After a year of shipping with only cables IPTV VoD hybrid, BT Vision, is now shipping with a DS2 power adaptor in every home, and given it is approaching 300,000 installs, and there are 2 devices given away for each home (with more sold by order) that’s a hefty chunks of chips at one IPTV operator. The DS2 200 Mbps chipset has sold 8 million devices so far, and are now retailing in devices around the $60 mark finally, sports AES 256 bit encryption and it has deals at Telefonica, Portugal Telecom, Swisscom and Telekom Austria, although in each of these the power connection is an option, not automatically installed. ‘We lost out at Belgacom to wireless delivery through Ruckus Wireless, but we are working hard to get that back,’ said Sales VP Victor Dominguez told us.
The company is also talking to a number of set top box vendors about either installing it inside the device or in a separate power supply and reckons that shortly Samsung will bundle the chips in its set tops. The DS2 driven adaptors now come with TR69, the remote management system developed for telcos for routers and it is increasingly becoming a self install proposition.
Which brings us neatly to advertising, which has many miles to go before a system can be put in place which reaches people based on their buying habits, their viewing habits, and where they are ‘ no matter what they are doing at the time, watching TV, playing a game or using their cellphone ‘ but that’s the direction of the general drift.
Packet Vision was on show for its fourth year, and we have watched it grow from a one man company with half an idea walking around bemused at IBC, to a company that offers a hosted model and is plugged into a variety of demographic databases. At the show it was talking up the idea of plugging in its system, through UDCast, to the huge variety of mobile TV implementations where UDCast has provided the IP encapsulator and where it has its own local splicing offering. But Packet Vision was also working with RMI, which sells high performance processors. Packet Vision’s addressable television advertising system, the PV 1000, is an integrated appliance with ad server, splicer and router, allowing advertisers to target different ads at different audiences simultaneously. It is based on the XLR Processor from RMI, an 8-core, 32-threaded device on a single chip using good old MIPS cores.
But at the other end of the spectrum Microsoft Mediaroom has finally got its
Advertising Platform together for the show which it says will allow similar targeting, supporting ad insertion into all TV content formats, including traditional linear television, VoD, interactive TV and the EPG itself, all conveniently served from the Atlas ad serving platform that it inherited from aQuantive last year.
But if all the impact from Microsoft’s entry into IPTV back in 2004 has finally dissipated, as companies have adjusted to exploit new openings in the market, Microsoft now seems to be catching its breath and beginning to target smaller IPTV operators.
At IBC it launched its Mediaroom Migration Program which is a structured assessment process using analytical migration tools to review set-top-box portability, network compatibility and audio-visual head-end interoperability along with risk-benefit tools to compare lifetime customer value. The idea seems to be to help telcos move from first generation IPTV systems to Mediaroom, though it may also apply to shifting from a cable based platform to IPTV over cable as well.
So the satisfied business that was IBC this year may still feel the hand of consolidation reaching out to it in subsequent years.