French conditional access firm Viaccess said this week that it was now signed to integrate its technology with the new Ericsson IPTV system which we have already denounced as being 3 years too late for prime market share.
To date there are still no announcements that Ericsson has won a single IPTV deal, not for its software nor for implementation, and yet Viaccess is now the third company to declare that it can offer CA for the service, after Secure Media and Verimatrix were part of the original announcement in September.
Ericsson is making a great play out of this being the only IPTV system which can be harmonized with its own IMS system (IP Multimedia Subsystem), but that must be a major piece of misdirection. IMS is an architecture for sending IP content from a fixed line network onto a cellular network. It is only needed because cellular networks are currently based on virtual switched circuits, something that will disappear with the arrival of LTE. Service functions, such as security or billing are dropped into the cellular network as standardized server based functions. Ericsson has yet to explain in public how this gives an operator any advantage in delivering IPTV and the idea that half of Europe is going to throw away their existing IPTV middleware and set tops in order to install something from the inexperienced Ericsson is fairly laughable.
Other suppliers which Ericsson has announced within its eco-system include content aggregator Accedo Broadband, video quality monitoring company Agama Technologies, set top suppliers Amino and Tilgin (now part of Amino), server supplier HP and home gateway company ZyXEL. Sun Microsystems is also a partner, though Ericsson has yet to say in what capacity.
Meanwhile Viaccess, which recently bought Orca Interactive, the Israeli IPTV middleware company now gives the impression that it is chasing business with other middleware operations, something that was always going to be inevitable.
Francois Moreau de Saint Martin, Viaccess CEO said: ‘Viaccess strongly believes that future revenues for the operators will come from interactivity, interoperability and flexibility requiring cross platform services. This business strategy requires a secured environment to support the sustainable development of the content industry.’
The Ericsson system is suspected of being an in-house development from encoder maker Tandberg, acquired by Ericsson in March 2007 to form part of an end to end IPTV strategy for Ericsson. Unfortunately we would expect that Tandberg was immediately off the Christmas card list for most rival middleware companies, not wanting to open any doors to an end to end supplier the size of Ericsson. If that’s the case we would expect encoder deals to be shifted to Tandberg rivals by all the other middleware suppliers.
It was also back in March 2007 that Ericsson formed a club for IPTV standardization, the Open IPTV Forum, which it says its software is compatible with. This was a forum which did not start life with membership from Alcatel or Microsoft, the two largest suppliers of IPTV in the western world or Nortel and IBM, rival suppliers which have their own IMS. However AT&T, Viaccess’ parent France Telecom, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Nokia Siemens Networks, Sony, and Telecom Italia were in the forum so that includes customers of both Alcatel and Microsoft Mediaroom.
Another not in the Forum at launch was Cisco, which has recently begun innovating at the IP and router level for IPTV channel switching and VoD serving and also makes considerable contributions to IMS architectures and owns set top maker Scientific Atlanta.
However Alcatel Lucent, Amino, T-Mobile, Huawei, Fastweb, LG, Motorola, Sigma (the chip supplier for Microsoft Mediaroom set tops) and UTStarcom, the dominant IPTV supplier in China, have all quietly joined since the Open IPTV Forum was started. Given that there are major architectural differences between all of their offerings we would expect that any standard out of that group, is fairly basic and hardly worth the paper it is written on. That’s the nature of standards groups with all the competing factions in them, really just a form of stand off.
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.
Clearly there is some attraction in being a member of the Open IPTV Forum, if just to ensure that Ericsson doesn’t push it towards its own technological strengths. But just how much integration is really needed for a company like Viaccess to make its products Ericsson compliant, given that Viaccess will have already integrated with those existing set tops in the past, is anyone’s guess. Our guess is that it is ‘none’ and that this is just a paper PR announcement because Ericsson wanted France Telecom to declare some support.
In the end what Ericsson is likely to be good at is integrating these existing IPTV services into its cellular infrastructure and possibly its MBMS cellular video multicasting technology. This might rely on using the Tandberg encoders to produce screens that can be delivered over three networks ‘ to TVs, PCs and handsets, using its IMS to accelerate the APIs and sign offs and reduce development work. Now a ready made product that could tie this up and create a video strategy that was three screens, from your existing IPTV service, that would be worth having.